Labor markets in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe underwent a dramatic transformation. Notably, this transformation took place within just a few years. Until the mid-2000s job opportunities were scarce and unemployment was high. But since then labor demand has picked up and...

Even though informal employment is wide-spread in transition economies the literature on this phenomenon in the region is rather scarce. For policy makers it is important to know the incidence and the determinants of informal employment. In the first part of the paper we demonstrate that its...

We use rich firm-level data and national input-output tables from 17 countries over the 2002-2005 period to test new and existing hypotheses about the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the efficiency of domestic firms in the host country (i.e., spillovers). We document that backward...

In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...

We use rich firm-level data and national input-output tables from 17 countries over the 2002-2005 period to test new and existing hypotheses about the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the efficiency of domestic firms in the host country (i.e., spillovers). We document that backward...

We use firm-level data and national input-output tables from 17 countries over the 2002-2005 period to test new and existing hypotheses about the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the efficiency of domestic firms in the host country (i.e., spillovers). Providing evidence from a larger...

This study adapts a relatively novel model of off-farm labor supply to the changing conditions of Bulgaria during the 1990s. The model’s parameters are estimated separately for each of the three different waves of the Bulgarian Integrated Household Survey, each reflecting remarkably different...

Even though informal employment is wide-spread in transition economies the literature on this phenomenon in the region is rather scarce. For policy makers it is important to know the incidence and the determinants of informal employment. In the first part of the paper we demonstrate that its...

Research on informal employment in transition countries has been very limited because of a lack of appropriate data. A new rich panel data set from Ukraine, the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), enables us to provide some empirical evidence on informal employment in Ukraine and...

In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...