On the global scene, the year 2008 was characterized by a lingering mortgage crisis in the first half of the year, and an onset of a global financial crisis and the impending recession in the second half of the year. On the background of these events, the annual CERGE-EI economic survey of the...

We provide new evidence on the effect of deterrence on crime using the experience of a transition country (the Czech Republic) as a quasi-natural experiment. The arrival of democracy in 1989 was accompanied by sharp reductions in all measures of deterrence and sharp increases in crime rates. We...

The Krugman hypothesis attributes high wage inequality in the US and high unemployment in continental Europe in the 1980s to the same negative change in the demand for the low skilled under different degrees of wage rigidity. This paper revisits the hypothesis in order to explain the labor...

We introduce spillover e¤ect into John Sutton's (1991,1998) concept of endogenous sunk costs. These sunk costs appear in the form of R&D investment into quality in our framework. We show that with spillovers increasing and the effectiveness of investment in raising quality decreas- ing, the...

Using a large panel of Czech manufacturing firms with 50 or more employees, we update the firmlevel labour demand elasticity estimates for 2002–2009. The economic crisis of 2008–2009 provides a source of variation needed for getting estimates that cover not only times of growth, but also a...

We link two important ideas: attention is scarce and a lack of information about an individual drives discrimination in selection decisions. We model how knowledge of ethnicity influences allocation of attention to available information about an applicant. When only a small share of applicants...

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...

We provide a parsimonious explanation for 80% of the extensive variation in gender unemployment gaps across the EU. We do so by dividing the EU countries into two groups and applying a single explanatory factor within each group. Specifically, we suggest that gender unemployment gaps arise...

We develop a novel estimator of unreported income, perhaps due to tax evasion, that does not depend on as strict identifying assumptions as previous estimators based on microeconomic data. The standard identifying assumption that the self- employed underreport income whereas wage and salary...

Two software developers, each offering a product variety of different (exogenously given) quality, compete in prices for heterogeneous users who choose from purchasing a legal version, using an illegal copy, and not using a product at all. Using an illegal version violates intellectual property...