The gravity model of trade is utilized to assess the impact of disintegration on trade. The analysis is based on three recent disintegration episodes involving the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. The results point to a very strong home bias around the time of disintegration,...

In 1993, Czechoslovakia experienced a two-fold break-up: On January 1, the country disintegrated as a political union, while preserving an economic and monetary union. Then, the Czech-Slovak monetary union collapsed on February 8. We analyze the economic background of the two break-ups, and...

This paper discusses the implications of accession of the Czech Republic to the European Union. First, we estimate the potential growth in the enlargement and the non-enlargement scenarios. Second, we provide a structural forecast of GDP components. We show that both forecasts are consistent....

The gravity model of trade is used to assess the economic consequences of new borders, which arose in the wake of break-ups of multinational federations in Eastern Europe. The intensity of trade relations among the constituent parts of Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union and the Baltics was very high...

Social capital in Central and Eastern Europe lags behind that in Western European countries. We analyze the determinants of individual stock of social capital - measured by civic participation and access to social networks - and find that this gap persists when we account for individual...

Cultural factors and especially common languages are well-known determinants of trade. By contrast, the knowledge of foreign languages was not explored in the literature so far. We combine traditional gravity models with data on fluency in the main languages used in EU and candidate countries....

We argue that econometric analyses of growth in post-communist countries are vulnerable to structural breaks across time and/or countries. We demonstrate this by identifying structural breaks in growth for 25 countries and over 18 years. The method we use allows identification of structural...