IZA - Labor Markets in Emerging and Transition Economies

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The Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS)

Funded by: Consortium led by IZA; the other permanent members of the consortium are: CERT, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh; EERC Ukraine; and RWI Essen. Project Start: 2002/07/01

Project leader(s):

Hartmut Lehmann (University of Bologna and IZA)

Short Description:

Ukraine, being one of the largest successor states of the former Soviet Union, is virtually terra incognita as far as our knowledge of labor market adjustment is concerned. While there has been some limited work done on labor market adjustment in Ukraine using firm survey and firm register data no serious studies exist that get at the behavior of individuals and households in the Ukrainian labor market. The main reason for this is the lack of good data at the individual and household level.
To alleviate this situation this program started an initiative to create a panel data set on the Ukrainian working age population, the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS). The ULMS panel data set, similar to the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, is conceived as a statistically representative sample of the Ukrainian population aged between 15 and 72 years, comprising 4000 households and approximately 8,500 individuals. The survey is being done by the Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). The first two waves of the data (collected in the spring of 2003 and of 2004) are now available to researchers of the sponsor organizations. These first two waves will become public user data in 2006.
The ULMS survey instrument is very detailed. The household questionnaire contains questions on the demographic structure of the household, its income and expenditure patterns as well as living conditions. The core of the survey instrument is however the individual questionnaire, which tries to elicit very detailed information about the labor market experience of Ukrainian workers. Apart from standard LFS sections, there is an extensive retrospective part for the first wave, which tracks workers’ labor market involvement at specific past points in time and which allows a complete reconstruction of workers’ labor market histories between January 1998 and the date of the interview in 2003. For subsequent waves, there are retrospective sections that again allow the reconstruction of a complete history between the preceding and the current wave. In addition there are sections on education and skills, the ownership structure and its evolution at workers’ firms, spatial mobility, health status and political and environmental attitudes. Finally, there is a large set of questions about wage arrears, payments in kind, unpaid leave etc. in order to address specific adjustment mechanisms that have taken place in Ukraine like in other labor markets of CIS countries. The ULMS provides arguably the most complete data source on labor market developments in any country of the CIS.

Publications:

Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Klara Sabirianova Peter	"Returns to schooling in Russia and Ukraine: A semiparametric approach to cross-country comparative analysis", in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2005, 33(2), 324-350 (IZA DP No. 1325).
Ina Ganguli, Katherine Terrell	"Institutions, markets and men's and women's wage inequality: Evidence from Ukraine", in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2006, 34(2), 200-227.
Hartmut Lehmann, Norberto Pignatti, Jonathan Wadsworth	"The incidence and cost of job loss in the Ukrainian labor market", in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2006, 34(2), 248-271.
Olga Kupets	"Determinants of unemployment duration in Ukraine", in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2006, 34(2), 228-247.
J. David Brown, John S. Earle, Volodymyr Vakhitov	"Wages, layoffs, and privatization: Evidence from Ukraine", in: Journal of Comparative Economics, 2006, 34(2), 272-294.
Amelie Constant, Martin Kahanec, Klaus F. Zimmermann	"The Russian-Ukrainian Political Divide", IZA DP No. 2530, December 2006 [view abstract]
Amelie Constant, Martin Kahanec, Klaus F. Zimmermann	"The Russian-Ukrainian Earnings Divide", IZA DP No. 2330, September 2006 [view abstract]

Last updated: 2005/02/10

SIMPL: A Tax-Benefit Microsimulation Model for Poland

Funded by: Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Social Affairs and Ministry of Economy of Poland Project Start: 2005/06/01 Project End: 2006/06/01
Project leader(s):	Olivier Bargain (University College Dublin and IZA), Michal Myck (DIW Berlin and IZA)
Participants:	Leszek Morawski (Warsaw University), Mieczyslaw Socha (Warsaw University)
Short Description:	Tax-benefit microsimulation models have now been available for some time in many OECD countries and have been extensively used by both policy makers and researchers - see for instance Sutherland (1995). Essentially, tax-benefit models allow computing the whole set of taxes and benefits in a country in order to obtain disposable income of households from a representative dataset. This way, it is possible to evaluate the redistributive potential of a system (distribution, inequality and poverty measures) or its incentive potential (effective marginal tax rates, financial gains to work). It also enables to simulate any kind of reform of the system, its cost, its effects on redistribution (e.g. winners and losers, impact on inequalities, etc.) and incentives (e.g. impact on effective marginal tax rates). The University of Warsaw, in collaboration with IZA and DIW, is coordinating the development of a national tax-benefit model for Poland, SIMPL. The first step consists of documenting in a detailed way the rules for each of the tax-benefit instruments and to simulate them in independent modules. Each module requires the knowledge of some household characteristics (e.g. child benefits require the age and number of children) and policy parameters (e.g. the official tax rate in the first tax bracket). In a second step, the simulation is plugged to a Polish database, the 2003 BBGD household budget survey, containing 32,452 representative households. This dataset gathers required characteristics concerning households (demographics, incomes, etc.) in order to proceed with the type of calculation described above. The program automatically computes the whole set of tax-benefit instruments for each household of the sample as well as its disposable income. The sample is weighted so that the aggregated amount of each instrument (e.g. total national amount of income tax) should correspond to the official amount available from other sources (statistic institute, ministries). This is part of the validation procedure which must ensure that the model is able to faithfully simulate taxes and benefits at the level of the population. The project will be finalized by mid-2006. On the one hand, the project team will ensure that economists at the three funding Ministries can adopt the model and make a fruitful use of it for policy analysis, which includes some short training at the end of the project. On the other hand, final reports will include some analysis of the current system and its redistributive and incentive potentials, as well as the analysis of topical reforms (introducing flat taxation, abolishing joint taxation, etc.).

Last updated: 2006/01/30

Inside the Black Box: Russian and Ukrainian Firms and Internal Labor Markets in Economic Transition

Funded by: Research Network of the German Research Foundation (DFG) "Flexibility in Heterogeneous Labour Markets" Project Start: 2006/12/01 Project End: 2008/11/30
Project leader(s):	Thomas Dohmen (ROA, Maastricht University and IZA), Hartmut Lehmann (University of Bologna and IZA)
Participants:	Anzelika Zaiceva (IZA and University of Bologna)
Short Description:	We analyze personnel data of large Russian and Ukrainian firms in the manufacturing sector, in order to shed light on the internal organization of labor in Soviet and Post-Soviet firms during the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. This marks the first attempt of studying detailed personnel records of firms in transition economies. We have already collected some data from the personnel records of one large Russian manufacturing firm for 1997 through 2003. These data will be refined by compiling additional information on worker and career characteristics and extended by gathering data covering the period from 1990 until 2008. This will allow us to analyze the internal labor market adjustments during perestroika and all stages of transition. In addition, we will collect personnel data in a similar format from two more Russian firms and at least one Ukrainian firm. We are the first to provide empirical evidence on the functioning of internal labor markets in transition economies. Complementing the literature on Western internal labor markets, we will make a crucial contribution by establishing those patterns of internal labor markets that prevail in any institutional setting and any economic environment and those patterns that are idiosyncratic. Analyzing what happens inside firms during transition is a constructive method to better understand the organizational and behavioral shifts in firms that undergo large scale restructuring. Therefore, the empirical study will also provide valuable insights for the analysis of transition and of other economies facing a major episode of structural change and thus will be useful for economic agents as well as for policy makers.

Last updated: 2007/01/17

Labor Markets in Emerging and Transition Economies

Events

Projects

The Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS)

SIMPL: A Tax-Benefit Microsimulation Model for Poland

Inside the Black Box: Russian and Ukrainian Firms and Internal Labor Markets in Economic Transition

Recent Discussion Papers

Selected Publications

Journal Articles: