We revisit the ubiquitous claim that aiding civil society improves institutional outcomes. In our model, a vibrant civil society initiates public debate in a reform process otherwise dominated by partisan interest groups and politicians. Civil society involvement can alleviate or aggravate...

In this article we investigate empirically the importance of labour market conditions and in particular the role of employment protection legislation as determinants of bilateral Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). We find that FDI flows are significantly higher in countries with relatively low...

Poor local information networks and weak social sanctions in urban settings make joint liability unable to guarantee high repayment rates to microlenders. Yet, microcredit programmes in Western Europe report good performance even if the majority of them require no collateral. We collected data...

This article deals with labour mobility in Georgia during economic transition. We use quarterly 1998-99 panel data to examine mobility across six labour market statuses (inactivity, unemployment, formal wage employment, informal wage employment, self-employment and farming). Our findings are...

In many developing and transition countries, we observe rather high levels of corruption. We argue that the missing political support for anti-corruption policies is due to a lack of economic and financial reforms. Our model is based on the fact that corrupt officials have to pay entry fees to...

We study the effects of Chinese monetary policy shocks on China's major trading partners in East and South-East Asia by estimating structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models for six economies in the region. We find that a monetary expansion in Mainland China leads to an increase in real GDP...

This article empirically investigates how the transition to a market economy affected the relationship between motherhood and labour force outcomes in Poland. We estimate different probit models on two panel datasets covering a three-year period before the reform (1987-1989) and a three-year...

An uneven distribution of natural resources and the Soviet legacy of artificial regional specialization expose Russia's regions to large income shocks. Using an unique regional dataset covering Russian regions between 1992 and 2003, we assess how these features influence the magnitude and...