Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro-data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...

This paper studies bank-failure models in the context of transition economies. In order to capture the default risk of banks, data on the structure of retail deposit rates is used to improve the prognostic quality of bank-failure prediction. The Czech bank crisis of 1994?1996, during which 14...

Substantial understatement of the degree of quality improvement during transition, and, therefore, a substantial overstatement of inflation rates has resulted in a serious downward bias in estimates of the rate of growth of post-communist economies. The move to free markets has apparently...

The present paper uses a survey of 1062 Czechs and 524 Slovaks to ask why people evade taxes. We maintain that the Czech and Slovak Republics are “twins” separated at birth and that divergences between these countries since their separation in 1992 can explain divergences in their rates of...

We use a dataset of 1062 individuals from the Czech Republic to forecast the evolution of tax evasion in that country. We ask each respondent how intensely (never, sometimes, often) he evaded taxes in 1995, 1999, and 2000, to calculate probabilities the average individual will move between these...

IV estimates of the link between profits and investment in the Czech Republic find a complex relationship. While firms may occasionally be credit rationed or face soft budget constraints, investments generally flow to industries with the greatest profit potential or need for recapitalization

Measurement of quality changes has proven to be an especially difficult aspect of calculating unbiased rates of inflation. We propose a new methodology of capturing quality improvements based on consumer focus groups and apply this methodology in an environment where quality changes might be...

A series of studies confirm results presented Filer and Hanousek (2000) suggesting that mismeasurement of inflation during the transition is a serious problem, on the same relative order of magnitude (and greater in absolute magnitude) as in advanced market economies. Overall, inflation has been...

The rapidly changing environment of the transition may create special problems for calculation of index numbers that require a fixed basket of goods and retail outlets. Using referent-level data we find that fixed- weight Laspeyres index on average overstated cost of living increases by...