Even though informal employment is wide-spread in transition economies the literature on this phenomenon in the region is rather scarce. For policy makers it is important to know the incidence and the determinants of informal employment. In the first part of the paper we demonstrate that its...

This paper analyzes the costs of job loss in China, using unique new data from the Rural-to-Urban Migration in China (RUMIC) data set for the year 2009. We investigate conventional labor market outcomes upon displacement like the length of unemployment spells, hours worked and monthly earnings....

Since the beginning of transition in 1990 from a centrally planned to a market oriented economy, the performance of Poland’s economy has been outstanding if we take GDP growth as our measure. In our opinion it is not specific reforms that can explain this performance but the radical (“big...

This paper analyzes, using country-level panel data from transition economies and Latin America, the impact of labor market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data...

This paper analyzes convergence in per capita gross regional product of Russia’s regions during the period 1995-2010, when regional data are available. Using a panel regression framework we find no evidence for beta-convergence. Instead we find divergence, which is, however, attenuated over...

A scientific methodology in general should provide two things: first, a means of explanation and, second, a mechanism for improving that explanation. Agent-based modelling ( ABM) is a method that facilitates exploring the collective effects of individual action selection. The explanatory force...

Unemployment is and will be for the foreseeable future one of the major issues of economies in transition. Not only is unemployment in Post-communist economies a socially explosive problem, what happens on the unemployment front allows us to also make inferences about the state of the transition...

Following the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990, the former German Democratic Republic was subject to a series of economic shocks, resulting in large declines in output and employment. This paper investigates the behaviour of the East German labour market during the initial stages...