Survivor testimonies link survival in deadly POW camps, Gulags, and Nazi concentration camps to the formation of close friendships with other prisoners. We provide statistical evidence consistent with these fundamentally selective testimonies. We study the survival of the 140 thousand Jews who...

This paper studies key markets (financial, labor, natural resource, and product) to assess how they are facilitating or constraining growth. First, we draw on the body of existing theoretical and empirical literature to discuss the links between markets and growth. Second, we present four...

An employer-based sample of over between 200,000 and 300,000 Czech and 50,000 to 100,000 Slovak workers is used to estimate returns to various forms of human capital between 1995 and 1997 (to be extended to 1998). By 1997 education of all types had become substantially more highly rewarded in...

We consider the growing theoretical literature on the optimum speed of transition (OST) and explore its validity using micro data from a transition economy. First, we ask whether the OST theories focus on the empirically most important job and worker reallocation flows. Second, we examine the...

Many empirical studies have confirmed the theoretical prediction that longer-term Unemployment Insurance (UI) entitlement leads to longer unemployment duration. Most of those studies have examined special programs that provide extra weeks of unemployment benefits when unemployment rates in the...

Extended unemployment benefits programs are triggered by the state insured unemployment rate while intrastate demand conditions often vary dramatically. Some tight local labor markets may therefore exhibit a large effect of extended unemployment benefits. Using a competing risk duration model,...

There is evidence that the introduction of unilateral divorce legislation (UDL) starting in the late 1960s increased US divorce rates. We ask whether making divorce easier affected the educational structure of marriage. Based on marriage and divorce certificate data covering 1970-1988, we...

This paper reports evidence on the strong tendency of the college educated to match with partners who graduated in the same field of study - a dimension of assortative matching that has been overlooked thus far. We employ Labor Force Survey data covering most EU countries to measure the extent...