This paper investigates the employment growth of small and medium-sized firms that survived the transformation process of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). We find that firms founded in the later period of the GDR’s existence have especially low growth prospects, even 10 years after German...

We study the reform of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOE) with a focus on the corporatization of SOEs. We first document the empirical patterns of the "grasp the large and let go of the small" policy. To quantify the implications of the reform for aggregate output and TFP, we build a...

The aim of this paper is to analyze how different models of transformation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) increased or decreased the risk of being stuck in the middle-income trap (MIT). The key finding is that the CEE and CIS countries are,...

The aim of this study is to investigate the negative correlation between unemployment and life satisfaction in the 27 post-socialist countries. First, we measured the well-being cost of life satisfaction brought from pecuniary and non-pecuniary sources. In line with the previous literature, the...

European countries are currently faced with a variety of challenges, ranging from the new global distribution of economic activity, the diffusion of new, radical technologies to the aging of its population, youth unemployment and the aftermath of the economic and financial crisis. These...