We explore how involuntary and voluntary exits from self-employment affect life and health satisfaction. To that end, we use rich longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1985 to 2017 and a difference-in-differences estimation. Our findings suggest that while transitioning...

Respondents from post-communist countries have been found to systematically report lower levels of happiness and self-rated health. While the first welfare gap in happiness has closed recently, the second transition gap in self-perceived gap only started to close. Specifically, this paper shows...

The declining labor share in national income and rising inequality over the last four decades raise questions about causes of these trends. In order to explain these trends, we develop a theoretical model that links intra-industry distribution of wages to variation in market power of firms. The...

Electoral legislation varies across countries and within countries over time, and across different types of elections in terms of how it allows publication of intermediate election results including turnout and candidates' vote shares during an election day. Using a pivotal costly voting model...

In the early nineties Central and East European Countries (CEEC) took considerable liberalisation efforts which led to visible changes in CEEC trade. In the period under observation, from 1995 to 2016, these countries recorded high growth rates, which exceeded the performance of other regions,...

In the early nineties Central and East European Countries (CEEC) took considerable liberalization efforts which led to visible changes in CEEC trade. In the period under observation, from 1995 to 2016, these countries recorded high growth rates, which exceeded the performance of other regions,...

Economists tend to reduce all corruption to impersonal market-like transactions, ignoring the role of social ties in shaping corruption. In this paper, we show that this simplification substantially limits the understanding of corruption. We distinguish between market corruption (impersonal...

We examine the causal effect of natural resource discoveries on income inequality using the synthetic control method on data from 1947 to 2009. We focus on the natural discoveries in Denmark, Netherlands and Norway in the 1960-1970s and use top 1% and top 10% income share as the measure of...

We analyze bank survival on large dataset covering 17 CEE markets during the period of 2007-2015 by estimating the Cox proportional hazards model. We group banks across countries and according to their financial soundness. Our results show that progress in banking reforms positively affects bank...

We investigate the effect of uncertainty on investment. We employ a unique dataset of 25000 Greek firms' balance sheets for 14 years covering the period before and after the eurozone crisis. A dynamic factor model is employed to proxy uncertainty. The investment performance of 14 sectors is...