This paper provides a critical overview and a detailed research agenda for scholars interested in regional studies with a special focus on old and new European Union member states. The focus is on the microeconomic foundations of structural change and its spatially asymmetric impact on labour...

This study attempts to explain why the transition to a market economy is skill-biased. It shows unequivocal evidence on increased skill wage premium and supply of skills in transition economies. It examines whether similar skill?favoring shifts in the Russian and U.S. economies are driven by the...

The existence of compensating differentials in Russian labor and housing markets is examined using data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) augmented by city and regional-specific characteristics from other sources. While Russia is undergoing transition to a market economy, we...

We look at the differences in regional unemployment rates in six major transition countries and their persistence over time. We analyse the role various adjustment mechanisms play. While movement out of the labour force seems to be one consequence in many regions with high relative unemployment,...

This paper uncovers evidence on the distribution of wages in Belarus in the second half of the 1990s. The returns to education and work experience are high and stable, which is atypical for a transition country. This might be due to the pervasive role of the state in fixing wages in the dominant...

Data from nine transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe are used to examine the role of computer adoption for returns to education. As in western economies, computers are adopted most heavily by young, educated, English-speaking workers with the best access to local telecommunications...

This paper exploits the rapid rise in self-employment rates in post-communist Eastern Europe as a valuable ?quasi-experiment? for understanding the sources of entrepreneurship. A relative demand-supply model and an individual sectoral choice model are used to analyze a 1993 survey of 27,000...

Ten years after the start of transition, there are many puzzles we still have to live with. Why did all countries experience strong declines in output at the outset of economic transformations and most of them are slowly, if at all, recovering from this ?transitional recession?? How can these...

This paper seeks to document and analyse changes in the distribution of wages and employment in the transition countries since the collapse of communism. Most countries experienced an increase in wage inequality during the initial shock of the transition. Proximate causes of this increase seem...

This article documents and analyses gross job flows and their determinants in Estonia over the years 1995-2001, using a database containing the population of officially registered firms in Estonia (all in all 52,000). Our results show that job creation and job destruction rates have been rather...