Based on the interviews with that time managers, the paper aims to find out whether ideology affected the dealing with labor force in the last two decades of the socialist regime in Czechoslovakia. Technically, the labor market was balanced and characterized by zero unemployment and low and highly equalized wages. However, actually, there was a permanent imbalance with the lasting dominance of demand over supply and overemployment. Increasing wages was, due to ideological and formal settings of the system nearly impossible, and thus the economic agents tried to find alternative “solutions” to this imbalance. This situation led to low motivation of the labor force and consequently to low productivity. The positive side was represented by relatively good relationships among the employees. We demonstrate on the interviews that in the clash between ideology and the market forces, the former was stronger and in fact prevented efficient functioning of the labor market.

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Homophily is a strong determinant of many types of human relationships. It affects, for example, whom we marry and potentially also whom we vote for. We use data on preferential voting from Czech parliamentary elections in 2006, 2010, 2013, and 2017 matched with 2011 Census data to identify the effect of homophily on voting behavior. We find that a one percent increase in the share of the municipality's population that has the same occupation or education level as the candidate increases the number of preferential votes that candidate receives by 0.7% or 0.5%, respectively. We also find that candidates who live in the voters' municipality receive a substantially higher number of preferential votes.

There were special relationships among the COMECON members during the period of the centrally planning system. Czechoslovak trade/export was naturally biased towards these countries. The goal of this paper is to find out if there still exists any export bias towards the Russian or the ex-COMECON markets. In our research approach we use gravity models. We revealed that taking into consideration growth in GDP, geographical distance and institutions there is no bias towards the Russian or the CIS markets. But we discovered a bias towards the ex-COMECON contemporary members of the EU.

Rational agents react on the incentives in the market economy as well as in the centrally planned economy. Economic laws are persistent regardless the economic system. Legislative system changes the outcome of the game between economic agents and managers. Base on the original survey among former managers as well as on the legislative sources from the 1970's and 1980's the taxonomy of economic reactions on the shortage economy was made. We distinguish plan manipulation in order to ensure payment bonuses; bribery in order to gain the short-supplied inputs and reserves' creation for the purpose of the fulfilling the plan. It was shown, that if the rational agent wanted to obey the higher law, he was forced to ignore lower legislation.