During the ongoing post-communist economic transitions, the relative well-being of many people is changing rapidly, and governments are not well positioned to accurately measure individual living standards. Under such circumstances, continued price controls over basic consumer goods within the...

This Selected Issues Paper for the Republic of Congo discusses economic development and policies. Domestic prices of refined petroleum products are administratively set by the authorities below import parity. Non-oil revenue in 2007 has remained about 20 percent of non-oil GDP, compared with...

The paper investigates the role of the minimum wage in a competitive economy in which there is underreporting of earnings by employed labour. The minimum wage induces higher compliance by some low- productivity workers and transforms a nominally neutral fiscal system into a regressive one. A...

In pursuit of its transition from a command to a market economy, post-Soviet Russia has witnessed enormous regional differences in economic growth rates. Moreover, the economic reforms implemented under this transition, while initiated at the federal level, have also differed markedly across...

The first paper of this dissertation utilizes unique data on teachers' union election certifications in Iowa, Indiana, and Minnesota to analyze the effect of teachers' unions on education production. I find teachers' unions have no impact on teacher pay, class sizes, or per-student expenditures,...