Betthäuser et al. (2023) examine the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the learning progress of school-aged children. They collect 291 estimates from 42 studies. Their meta-analysis-corrected estimate implies a substantial decline in students' learning (Cohen's d = -0.14, 95% confidence...

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across...

In an era of rapid technological change, information exchange, and emergence of knowledge-intensive industries it is critical to be able to identify the future skill needs of the labour market. Growing unemployment in EU member states and pre-accession countries in Eastern Europe combined with...

Difference in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large and persistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regions of four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and we explore potential explanations for...

Do women perform worse than equally able men in stressful competitive settings? We ask this question for competitions with a high payoff---admissions to tuition-free selective universities. With data on an entire cohort of Czech students graduating from secondary schools and applying to...

One potential impact of the looming EU accession of Central European economies is unemployment hysteresis working through long-term unemployment (LTU). In this paper, we explore the mechanisms of LTU by providing a detailed description of the recent rise in Czech LTU following the recession of...

It is well known that highly `female' fields of study in tertiary education are characterized by higher fertility. However, existing work does not disentangle the selection-causality nexus. We use variation in gender composition of fields of study implied by the recent expansion of tertiary...