Expenditure on social protection in the European Union (EU) member states has been increasing rapidly over the last decade. To cover the increasing expenses, the countries need to find ways to increase revenues. Social protection financing systems and structure of financing vary across...

We show that principal component analysis enables the construction of geographic divisions of European social modelsNordic, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean, Continental, and Postcommunist, that basically follow Esping-Andersen's (1990) welfare regime typology. Instead of Esping-Andersen's criteria of...

Within the first 20 years of the market economy in Estonia, the public school market has been decentralized in Tallinn. Firstly, we describe how students are allocated to primary schools in a narrative, and secondly, in a formal mechanism design language. We indicate the closest equivalent...

This article presents empirical analysis of the effects of school choice policy in Estonia. We show that relying on market and giving autonomy to the schools over student selection without any central priority matching or other central guidelines will produce admission tests, even in...

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate of institutional research in economics and the methodological debate over the plausibility of using analytic narratives, in social sciences in particular. Using a single historical case we argue that in Tallinn by and large the merchant guild solved a...