Early transition literature linked large number of firm failures with the inability to overcome the pre-transition misallocation of resources, i.e. the inadequate capital-labor ratio. We look at the link between misallocation and firm survival using a rich firm-level dataset of over 1600 manufacturing plants established in a centrally planned economy after 1945. Our duration models include the standard Olley-Pakes misallocation measures as well as firm-level counterfactual level of capital that takes into account the present day market allocation and productivity. We show that i) misallocation was rather a firm-level than sector-level phenomenon and more importantly ii) it did not have a sizeable effect on the actual firm survival. Moreover, privatization tends to be negatively related to firm survival. This may imply both inappropriate self-selection into privatization programs and possibly inadequate implementation of the privatization.

This paper utilizes our novel dataset on survival of all state manufacturing plants from 1988, details here.

We present empirical evidence that large structural shocks are followed by changes in labor market inequality. Specifically, we study short-run fluctuations in adjusted gender wage gaps (unequal pay for equal work) following episodes of structural shocks in the labor markets, using several decades of individual data for a wide selection of transition countries. We find that for cohorts who entered the labor market after the onset of transition. Labor market shocks lead to significant declines in the gender wage gap. This decrease is driven mostly by episodes experienced among cohorts who enter the labor market during the transition. By contrast, we fail to find any significant relation for cohorts already active in the labor market at the time of transition. We provide plausible explanations based on sociological and economic theories of inequality.

Undergoing a large structural shock, labor markets indeed do become less inclusive, but it has taken us several turns to identify a convincing knowledge gap and hypotheses appealing to the academic community. A much different and earlier version of this text was in the past developed within DISCef project. Our work has since changed substantially: the deeper understanding of theoretical foundations has led to improving the empirical approach and information content of interpretation. Originally, we combined a study into gender wage gaps, with a study into gender employment gaps. This approach had too much empirical clutter and too dispersed theoretical foundations. Eventually, the original work has evolved into two separate studies: the current, focused on structural shocks and wage inequality, and a companion paper looking at long-term drivers of gender inequality in access to employment.  

The files required to reproduce our findings are available below.

Despite an apparent consensus in the literature that privatization leads universally to an increase in firm performance, the problem of endogeneity bias is profound and has been emphasized in a number of meta-analyses. We propose a new instrument to address the endogeneity bias and apply it Polish medium and large firms over 1995-2008. We find that improvement in firm performance is not universal, in particular, we find no improvement among manufacturing firms privatized to domestic investors. 

Methods for estimating the the scope of inequality in various outcome measures such as income, education, health or poverty are fairly accurate in detecting differences adjusted for individual characteristics. However, the actual estimated inequality may depend on the interaction between (the weakness of) the method and (the weakness of) the institutional environment. We make a case by comparing the country rankings for the adjusted gender wage gap among 23 EU countries. We show that the effects of these interactions are indeed large by comparing the estimates from various methods obtained from the same database. In fact, depending on the control variables and estimation method, a country may change its position in the ranking by as much as 10 positions -- both towards greater equality and towards greater inequality. We argue that this variability in country ranking position may yield important policy insights into prioritizing intervention. We also infer that given the intimate and unbreakable relationship between institutional deficiencies and features of the adjustment methods, ranking per se may be misguiding the public debate and thus should be abandoned or substantially refined.

Gender wage gaps are typically measured by the means of decomposition. Proliferation of methods makes the choice of the correct estimator for a given data a conceptual challenge, especially if data availability necessitates simplifications. The challenge lies in accounting for observable differences adequately, which in itself is not only a data issue, but also a conceptual issue. Ideally, one would want to compare men and women actually “alike” in terms of all relevant characteristics, including hours effectively worked, commitment, talent. However, many of these characteristics are not observable (or are imperfectly measured, e.g. human capital).

Decompositions are prone to multiple risks. For example, the urge to compare only the comparable implies that a decision needs to be made about the use of observations which clearly are not comparable. Nopo (2008) proposes to use these observations to infer about the possible selectivity in this process, but alternative approaches consist of reweighing or neglecting this issue. Similar choices concern the treatment of distributional issues. Finally, for the parametric methods, the dependence on the functional form may influence the results as well. Consequently, depending on the features of a given labor market, an estimate of gender wage gap obtained with a given method is likely to overstate or understate the extent of true unjustified inequality in wages.

We make available a dataset which provides a full selection of gender wage gap estimates for the EU countries, using data from EU-SILC. Across countries and years, everybody can see for themselves, what is the source of the gender wage inequality in a given European country. We provide:

• A dta file with the full set of estimates for the gender wage gaps and a generating dofile
• Data documentation

Abstract

Income inequality in the context of large structural change has received a lot of attention in the literature, but most studies relied on household post-transfer inequality measures. This study utilizes a novel and fairly comprehensive collection of micro data sets from between 1980’s and 2010 for both advanced market economies and economies undergoing transition from central planning to market based system. We show that wage inequality was initially lower in transition economies and immediately upon the change of the economic system surpassed the levels observed in advanced economies. We find a very weak link between structural change and wages in both advanced and post-transition economies, despite the predictions from skill-biased technological change literature. The decomposition of changes in wage inequality into a part attributable to changes in characteristics (mainly education) and a part attributable to changes in rewards does not yield any leading factors.

Data

This paper uses a large collection of individual level data, described in detail in the paper. We acquired over 1600 individual level data for 44 countries over three decades. Contact us if you would want to utilize this vast collection of data. The inequality measures are shared here.

 
Women in developed economies have experienced an unparalleled increase in employment rates, to the point that the gap with respect to men was cut in half. This positive trend has often been attributed to changes in the opportunity costs of working (e.g. access to caring facilities) and not-working (e.g. educational attainment). Meanwhile, the gender employment gaps were stagnant in transition economies. Admittedly, employment equality among genders was initially much higher in transition countries. We exploit this unique evidence from transition and advanced countries, to analyze the distributional nonlinearities in the relationship between the institutional environment and the (adjusted) gender employment gaps. We estimate comparable gender employment gaps on nearly 1600 micro databases from over 40 countries. We relate these estimates to changes in the opportunity costs of working and not-working. Changes in opportunity costs exhibited stronger correlation with gender employment equality where the gap was larger, i.e. advanced economies. We provide some evidence that these results are not explained away by transition-based theories, and argue that the observed patterns reflect a level effect. Currently, advanced and transition economies are at par in terms of gender employment equality. Hence, the existing instruments might not be sufficient to further reduce the gender employment gap.

The data for replication is distributed here.

We investigate willingness to share and download cultural content by implementing a novel "piracy game" modelled after standard public good games. Subjects' decisions have real consequence, as they are rewarded with individual "transfer" on a file-sharing service. We find that willingness to share depends positively on the sharing by others. Interestingly, however, this tendency does not seem to be associated with reciprocity or other-regarding social preferences. We employ several measures of sharing - from self-reporting to experimental - and incorporate to the analysis other factors which may explain the autonomous willingness to share, irrespective of the group effects. We find that conditional cooperation in content sharing is fairly prevalent, but unrelated to personality traits, attitude towards risk, attitude towards the other, marginal valuation, as well as socio-demographic characteristics.

The aim of this paper is to compare estimates of the adjusted wage gap from different methods and sets of conditioning variables. We apply available parametric and non‐parametric methods to LFS data from Poland for 2012. While the raw gap amounts to nearly 10 percent of the female wage; the adjusted wage gap estimates range between 15 percent and as much as 23 percent depending on the method and the choice of conditional variables. The differences across conditioning variables within the same method do not exceed 3pp, but including more variables almost universally results in larger estimates of the adjusted wage gaps. Methods that account for common support and selection into employment yielded higher estimates of the adjusted wage gap. While the actual point estimates of adjusted wage gap are slightly different, all of them are roughly twice as high as the raw gap, which corroborates the policy relevance of this methodological study.

Ethical norms on the Internet are believed to be more permissive than in the ‘real’ world and this belief often serves as an explanation for the prevalence of the so-called digital “piracy”. In this study we provide evidence from a vignette experiment that contradicts this claim. Analyzing the case of sports broadcast, we compare explicitly the ethical judgment of legal and illegal sharing in the offline and online context. We find that the norms concerning legality, availability of alternatives and deriving material benefits from sharing content do not differ substantially between the virtual and real worlds. We also test explicitly for the role of legal awareness and find that emphasizing what is prohibited (copyright infringement) is less effective than focusing on what is permitted (fair use) in reducing the disparity between legal and ethical norms.

Two main features of the reallocation process that took place in Eastern European and Former Soviet Union countries should be distinguished. The first feature was the decline in public sector employment as a result of the collapse of state-owned enterprises, linked with an increase in private sector employment as new private firms emerged and old public companies were privatized. The second feature was, and still is, the reallocation of labor from manufacturing to the service sector. Data from the Polish Labor Force Survey for the period 1995–2015 were used to construct measures of worker flows, gross and net, and their cyclical properties were used as a way to test the predictions of structural change and transition theories. It was found that labor market adjustments tend to amplify in upturns of the business cycle, while worker flows contribute only a fraction to the changing structure of employment. The policy implications of these findings are discussed.

Pension system reforms involve fiscal consequences. In practice, a variety of fiscal closures may be implemented, while not all of them involve the same extent of distortions. This paper develops an overlapping generations model to analyze the case of a shift from pay-as-you-go defined benefit system to a partly funded defined contribution system. We calibrate the system to mimic the economy of Poland, which actually implemented such reform in 1999. We analyze the efficiency of the reform with two main closure types: public debt and taxes. Regardless of the fiscal closure scenario this particular reform seems to be efficient in terms of welfare and enhances economic performance. Comparing the welfare of various closures we find that while labor taxation yields relatively higher welfare gain, public debt closure involves least need for the redistribution if capital pillar is to be implemented.

This paper was awarded Joseph A. Schumpeter Prize from Deutsche Bundesbank.

In this study, we try to assess the prevalence of illicit downloading in the market of audio books and the willingness to admit to such practices. We compare the Bayesian Truth Serum (Prelec, 2004) treatment in which truthful responses and precise estimates are rewarded to the control treatment with a flat participation fee. We find a sizable treatment effect – incentivized ‘pirates’ admit approximately 60% more often than the nonincentivized ones.

In many countries, the fiscal tension associated with the global financial crisis brings about the discussion about unprivatizing the social security system. This article employs an Overlapping Generations model to assess ex ante the effects of such changes to the pension reform in Poland from 1999 as implemented in 2011 and in 2013. We simulate the behaviour of the economy without the implemented/proposed changes and compare it to a status quo defined by the reform from 1999. We find that the changes implemented in 2011 and in 2013 are detrimental to welfare. The effects on capital and output are small and depend on the selected fiscal closure. Implied effective replacement rates are lower. These findings are robust to time inconsistency. The shortsightedness of the governments imposes welfare costs.