Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led Western governments to impose extensive sanctions on the Russian economy and the people who maintain the regime - the so-called oligarchs. The enforcement of these sanctions and the manoeuvres of these oligarchs to evade them have created new...

The Russian war of aggression has deepened relations between the EU and Ukraine. This can be seen, above all, in Ukraine’s EU candidate status. Despite the war, Ukraine continues to pursue many reforms, even if their pace has slowed since February 2022. The strong concentration of power in the...

Martial Law exacerbated cronyism and oligarchy by concentrating power into the hands of one political clan. Technocratic industrial policy combined with political anti-oligarch rhetoric spurred the rationalization and liberalization of different economic sectors, with substantial state support...

At the end of the Cold War the west imposed economic "shock therapy" on the countries of the former Soviet Union to rapidly turn the communists into capitalists, creating oligarchs. One of the few Africa countries where shock therapy was imposed was Mozambique. Shock therapy was intended to push...

We develop a dynamic political economy model in which investment in the state capacity to levy taxes and deter crime is a policy variable, and we study the evolution of state capacity when policy is chosen by an elite. We show that democratization in the sense of expansion of the elite leads to...

This paper develops a partial equilibrium model to account for stylized facts about the behavior of oligarchs, politically and economically strong conglomerates in transition and developing countries. The model predicts that oligarchs are more likely than other owners to invest in productivity...

This paper develops a model where this is a trade-off between the enforcement of the property rights of different groups. An oligarchic' society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights, but also tends to erect significant entry barriers,...