Returns to Human Capital Under The Communist Wage Grid and During the Transition to a Market Economy

Abstract

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Wage determination under plan and early transition: Bulgarian evidence using matched employer–employee data

“…As in other country-specific studies (e.g. Bird et al, 1994;Orazem and Vodipevic, 1994;Chase, 1998;Munich et al, 1999) and as found by Newell and Reilly (1999) in their study of nine transition countries, during transition, returns to education increase. However, in Bulgaria typically these returns to education are lower than elsewhere --compared with those found by Flanagan (1994) for the Czech Republic and with returns exceeding 7% in Germany and Poland (Rutkowski, 1994).…”

Private returns to human capital over transition: A case study of Belarus

“…In the first systematic study of income and wage inequality in former communist countries, Atkinson and Mickelwright (1992) argued that, beyond the communist ideology, inequality was not low, that the returns to education were at least as high and the returns to work experience were as concave as in the West. Similar conclusions are reached in Katz (1999) and Munich, Svejnar and Terrell (2002). Conversely, Benitez-Silva and Cheidvasser (2000) claim 2 This statement is based on the idea that market criteria existing in Western countries are the benchmark to evaluate efficiency also in former Socialist economies.…”

Returns To Education In The Economic Transition : A Systematic Assessment Using Comparable Data

“…With the exception of the work of Rutkowski (1999) and Jones and Simon (2004), this study is also the only other attempt to estimate the trends in returns to schooling in Bulgaria. Finally, we consider our measure of the number of years of schooling to be more accurate than the one adopted in many other studies (e.g., Brainerd, 1998;Flanagan, 1998;Vernon, 2002), since we use the number reported by the respondents themselves, rather than an imputed value derived from the reported school attainment (see Munich, Svejnar, & Terrell, 1999).…”