Institutions, Markets and Men’s and Women’s Wage Inequality: Evidence from Ukraine ∗ Ukraine, the second largest country in the former Soviet bloc, is facing the challenge of rallying popular support for major structural reforms. As in most developing economies, the “Orange Revolution” government’s success will depend on its ability to keep income distribution within an acceptable range. This p...

On December 2, when Venezuelans delivered President Hugo Chávez his first electoral defeat in nine years, most analysts were taken by surprise. According to o⁄cial results, 50.7 percent of voters rejected Chávez’s proposed constitutional reform, which would have expanded executive power, gotten rid of presidential term limits, and paved the way for the construction of a “socialist” economy. It ...

on the complex upper half-plane H, provably invariant under the linear fractional action of SL2(R), but it is oppressive to verify this directly. Worse, the goal is not merely to verify an expression presented as a deus ex machina, but, rather to systematically generate suitable expressions. An important part of this intention is understanding reasons for the existence of invariant operators, a...

The aim of this paper is to analyse the political, social and economic background of the divergence of Belarusian and Ukrainian transitions. We focus on Belarus in order to find explanation for questions such as why could Lukashenko remain the authoritarian leader of Belarus, while in Ukraine the position of the political elite had proved less stable and collapsed in 2004. On the theoretical fr...

These are but a few of the major problems the author had to tackle in writing this book, and he does justice to both sides of the arguments with unrelenting impartiality. The volume obviously is a survey-book for the non-professional public, nevertheless one would still prefer to have some of the author's own opinions instead of sweeping and often contradictory generalizations in an almost epig...

a reliable method is described for rapid proliferation of axillary shoots from nodal segment of mature field-grown aromatic and medicinal plant vitex negundo through in vitro culture. of different concentrations of n6-benzyladenine (ba) evaluated as supplements to murahige and skoog (ms) medium, ba at 1mg/l was effective in enhancing bud break and shoot regeneration. response of explants was al...

The victory of Viktor Yanukovych in the second round of Ukraine’s 2010 presidential election has been widely portrayed as a rebuke of the 2004 Orange Revolution and the pro-Western alignment it ushered in. Even before the election, however, the effects of the Eurasian color revolutions, celebrated with such euphoria in some Western foreign policy circles in the mid-2000s, had far-reaching and u...

Credit card default losses increased dramatically in the 80s and 90s, from 3% to over 5% of outstanding debt. We explore whether technological progress in debt collection is behind this change by developing a new theory featuring costly state verification with signals. We motivate our approach by the predominance of informal bankruptcy in the credit card market, which necessitates the costly in...

Once there was a time when mainframes walked the earth and reigned supreme over all the land. Lowly users were far too unclean and unschooled to commune with these vastly superior beings made of silicon and software, and so there arose among us a programming priesthood who served as intermediaries between human and machine. Like the monks of old, who studiously labored over the production of el...