published in: Economics of Transition, 2003, 11 (2), 291-320
Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known
about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this
sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation
across two different transition economies: Estonia, which experienced rapid destruction of the
pre-existing firms, and the Czech Republic, which reduced the old sector gradually. We find
job growth within industries to be quantitatively more important than job growth due to
across-industry reallocation. Furthermore, the industrial composition of startups is strikingly
similar in the two countries. We offer convergence to "western" industry firm-size distributions
as an explanation. We also find regularities in wage evolution across new and old firms,
including small differences in job quality across the two transition paths.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.