Across nine transition economies, it is the young, educated, English-speaking workers with the best access to local telecommunications infrastructures who work with computers. These workers earn about 25 percent more than do workers of comparable observable skills who do not use computers....

This paper, using unique survey data from the banking industry in rural China, investigates the effect of incentive contracts on performance. In the context of China's economic transition, we find that the incentive contracts have a positive effect on the bank manager's performance in deposit...

This paper studies how the Russian crisis of 1998 affected listed firms in transition economies. The data cover 394 companies that were listed before the Russian crisis, and include financial, industry, ownership and stock market information. Results show that in the short term (within one month...

This paper presents and analyses the sharp increase in hourly wage inequality after 1998 in Poland. The increase was similar in magnitude to the much-studied increase in British wage inequality during the 1980s. Using data from the Polish Labour Force Survey, we find this increase to be...

We present a model in which capital assets can only be owned by members of a relatively small politically connected elite ('the oligarchs'), each member of which faces a given risk of being expropriated, and we investigate the implications of such an imperfection of property rights for the...

Debt financing is expected to improve the quality of corporate governance, but we find, using a large sample of public listed companies (PLCs) from China, that an increase in bank loans increases the size of managerial perks and free cash flows and decreases corporate efficiency. We find that...

The aggregate average wage is often used as an indicator of economic performance and welfare, and as such often serves as a benchmark for changes in the generosity of public transfers and for wage negotiations. Yet if economies experience a high degree of (non-random) fluctuation in employment,...

This paper focuses on the process of capital accumulation and the forces that drive it in the countries undergoing the transition from plan to market. The methodological framework for analyzing the determinants of aggregate business investment draws on the neoclassical accelerator model,...

The robust Russian economic recovery after the 1998 financial crisis raised the economic standing of the population, especially for lowly paid workers, most of whom are women. In this paper I use the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey from 1996 through 2002 to ask whether this helped to...