Previous papers in this Special Series, have described in detail the theoretical background and development patterns, along with some empirical results, for the privatisation processes in Bulgaria and Poland. A range of issues have been raised which demand closer empirical investigation. For...

In socialist economies firms have provided various social benefits, like child care, health care, food subsidies, housing etc. Using panel data from Bulgarian and Polish firms, this paper attempts to explain firm-specific provision of social benefits in the process of transition. We investigate...

New survey data for a panel of Polish firms is used to estimate employment and wage adjustments under various forms of ownership (insider vs. outsider) and asymmetric response to exogenous shocks. In contrast to earlier studies, dynamic panel data estimators (GMM) allow for endogeneity of...

This volume contains the articles and papers which predominately have been published in international journals or edited volumes in the period from 1979 to 2009. The single articles reflect the main research areas of the editor and his co-authors who were engaged at the Kiel Institute of World...

This article questions Milton Friedman’s methodological position in a famous essay dating to 1948 where he questions the validity of tests of the assumptions of economic theory. Valid tests, he maintains, by and large, concern the empirical implications of hypotheses derived from the theory....

This article attempts to show that Pigou does not rely on the "wealth effect" in his attack on the doctrine of "unemployment equilibrium" with flexible money wages (a doctrine which, incidentally, he never considers clearly Keynesian). Instead, he depends on a form of "substitution effect,"...

Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) is generally believed to have rejected the classical theory of comparative costs. He supposedly maintained, contrary to the classical view, that transportation costs instead of international factor immobilities were the primary basis for a special theory of...

This paper questions the popular anthropological assumption that all purpose money rules in the West today. Contrary to the followers of Karl Polanyi in anthropology, modern as well as primitive money is special purpose money. It is argued further that serious difficulties and confusions arise...