no education to a postgraduate degree. For working experience, the ages of respondents are used as a proxy on the assumption that older workers generally have more work experience.

Parental educational attainment is defined as the educational attainment of the father or mother, whichever is greater, and this is also an aspect of the socioeconomic background of individuals. Parental political affiliation is identified according to the responses to questions about whether the parents of respondents were members of the Communist Party, which is particularly relevant because Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia were part of the Soviet Union, and this is also used as an indicator of social status.<sup>4</sup> There is no direct measure of the ethnicity of individuals; so the language spoken by a respondent is taken as a cue, especially depending on the country of residence of the respondent.<sup>5</sup> Figure 4 illustrates the conceptual framework. An assumption supporting the framework is that educational attainment—an important marker of skills and experience—should be a major determinant of the ability to obtain a good job in the labor market. Therefore, a labor market that places a premium on education and experience can be regarded as a fair labor market. In contrast, a labor market that allocates opportunities based on the gender, ethnicity, paternal educational attainment, or parental political affiliation is deemed an unfair labor market, although, in many cases, this is not due to discrimination, but the unequal effect of an incomplete transition to equitable access to opportunities. The World Bank (2015) finds that, in Armenia and Georgia, education helps in gaining access to jobs, although the unemployment rate among the welleducated is relatively high in comparison with the average in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and a significant share of workers (29 percent in Armenia and 33 percent in Georgia) consider themselves overeducated for their current jobs. The World Bank study also shows that, while skills matter more than educational attainment in explaining the variance in hourly wages among youth (ages 15–29), the role of education in explaining wage variance is higher among prime workers (ages 30–44).

> 4 Parental affiliation with the Communist Party can be considered an unfair advantage in the labor markets of former communist countries especially among people in older birth cohorts who entered the labor market during the communist era. Parental affiliation with the Communist Party might also affect labor market access negatively, an unfair disadvantage, among people who entered the labor market in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet, the analysis here is aligned with the view that social status is a durable institution that persists in the aftermath of a political crisis, especially if the crisis leads to more labor market imperfections because of the destruction of information networks. Another interpretation is that parental affiliation is a signal of motivation, especially in a situation in which the only opportunity for upward social movement is associated with Communist Party membership.

> 5 This paper reflects an acknowledgment that there is a possibility that ethnicity does not play a major role in accessing good jobs because of the effect of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s that effectively eliminated minorities.

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