Bulgaria's transition to a market economy has coincided with a large increase in wage inequality. Given the emphasis on wage leveling in pre-transition Bulgaria, the rise in wage inequality may be due to managers rewarding more productive workers; or it may be the result of rewarding...

CONTEXT: The prevalence of overweight (OW) among children in the United States has increased during the last three decades, but prevalence measures fail to reveal the extent to which OW children exceed the OW threshold. OBJECTIVE: To measure the amount by which OW children exceed the OW...

This paper considers alternate measures of overweight in the U.S. that are sensitive to changes in the body-mass index (BMI) distribution, more robust to measurement error and continuous in the body-mass index (BMI) at the overweight threshold. The measures suggest that standard prevalence rates...

Essentially all empirical questions that are addressed with sample data require estimates of sampling variance. The econometrics and statistics literatures show that these estimates depend critically on the design of the sample. The sample for the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS), which...

This study assesses whether income constraints inhibit spending on fruits and vegetables among low-income households. If this is the case, then it is hypothesized that the distribution of expenditures on fruits and vegetables by low-income households should be stochastically dominated by the...

Although the theoretical literature has identified various sizeable benefits from foreign direct investment inflows (FDI), the empirical literature has been unable to establish a positive and significant impact of FDI on the rates of economic growth of host countries. One reason for this...

In an era of rapid technological change, information exchange, and emergence of knowledge-intensive industries it is critical to be able to identify the future skill needs of the labour market. Growing unemployment in EU member states and pre-accession countries in Eastern Europe combined with...

Why are socially beneficial reforms not implemented? One simple answer to this question (which has received little attention in the literature) is that this may be caused by generalised uncertainty about the effectiveness of reforms. If agents are unsure about whether a proposed reform will...

This essay surveys macroeconomic issues that marked the transition from centrally planned to market economy in Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries. We first establish a set of stylized facts of the transition so far, namely: (1) output fell, (2) capital shrank, (3)...

There are two strands in the empirical literature on economic growth in transition economies. One focuses on the impact of reforms, while the other emphasizes sustainability issues and the growth prospects these economies face. The most common strategy, in the latter, has been to use...