February 2000 - Some say that democracy is more likely to survive under parliamentary governments. That result is not robust to the use of different variables from the Database of Political Institutions, a large new cross-country database that may illuminate many other issues affecting and...

We examine the evolution of industrial output in Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland and Romania over the period 1989-1995 in terms of product trade orientation prior to the transition process, some products traded in a market economy while others traded in the artificial market of the Soviet Bloc. We...

Most post-communist economies are characterized by an initial collapse in aggregate output. Blanchard and Kremer (1997) and Roland and Verdier (1997) have recently modelled supply side distortions, disorganization in the links of production, that can lead to a short-term output contraction after...

We model job reallocation and unemployment as outcomes jointly determined by the structure of inherited social capital within a two-sector Optimal Speed of Transition model. Treating regions of Poland as independent labour markets, the socio-economic inheritance of regions is found to be a...

A simple model of wage setting and restructuring predicts that the average wage level in a regional labour market in Poland, among other factors, will be negatively related to the unemployment rate and positively related to the degree of regional restructuring. As in Blanchflower and Oswald...

In the early days of transition Poland hosted regional earning disparities. Low levels of worker and firm mobility allow us to threat regions as local labor markets. Wage behavior is modeled in regional labor markets as an outcome of the speed of transition examining employment restructuring in...