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LABOR
MARKETS
AND
THE APPLIED MICROECONOMICS OF TRANSITION
6-17 July, 1998
Course Director: John S. Earle (Associate
Professor of Economics and Director of Labor Project, CEU)
Resource Persons:
Erik Berglof
(Stockholm School of Economics)
Alexander Dyck (Harvard Business School)
John S. Earle (Stanford University, CEU)
Guido Friebel (SITE)
János Köllõ (Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy
of Sciences)
Loránd Ambrus-Lakatos (CEU)
Phil Merrigan (University of Quebec at Montreal)
Ugo Pagano (University of Sienna)
Klaus Wallner (SITE)
Course Objectives
The purpose of this course is
to provide East European economists with further education in the microeconomic
analysis of the restructuring process in transitional economies, with a
special emphasis on labor market adjustment. Currently, there is
great interest on the part of policymakers throughout the region and international
organizations on the design of policies both to facilitate and to cushion
the effects of restructuring, yet rather little research has addressed
the behavioral and social implications of alternative strategies.
The course would provide a forum to share the methodologies and findings
developed by the CEU Economics Department and Labor Project, which has
become a center for research and data collection in this area, and to develop
a wider network of faculty and scholars cooperating on the investigation
of these topics.
Curriculum
While the bulk of the economic
literature on transition is highly descriptive, a significant theoretical
literature has also developed. Both the theoretical and the applied
literatures are rather scattered and seldom analyzed as a coherent whole,
however. The course will seek to provide an overview of the various
approaches to theoretical models that have been used in the analysis of
microeconomic problems in the transition and to attempt to discover new
approaches. A chief aim will be to develop ways of bringing
together well-defined theoretical propositions with econometric tools and
appropriate microdata sets for testing them. The theory classes will
emphasize institutional economics and models of mobility, incentives, and
information, and they will cover all of the principal theoretical articles
on the microeconomic problems of transition. Topics will include
privatization, competition, labor market transitions, restructuring, soft
budget constraints, incentives in organizations, and institutional change.
Seminars will be held where significant papers from the literature and
ongoing research will be discussed, and participants will be encouraged
to report on their own research and on their experiences in teaching courses
in the microeconomics of transition. By contrast with earlier years,
the course will not attempt to provide a complete introduction to labor
econometrics. Rather, the econometric techniques will be discussed
as they arise in the consideration of certain issues and papers.
Resource Persons
The lectures will be given and seminars
led by economists both from Eastern Europe and former Soviet Union and
from Western universities. Economists from the Stockholm Institute
of Transition Economics will participate in all parts of the course.
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