The absence or the presence of the resource curse is often explained by the specifics of political and institutional factors. The aim of this paper is to study this effect looking separately at economic and political institutions and at their interaction. Unlike most empirical papers in the...

This working paper contains supplementary material to the paper Communism or Communists? Soviet Legacies and Corruption in Transition Economies. The supplementary material covers the description of calculation and sources of key variables, as well as reports summary statistics and provides...

We examine the case of the Czech Republic, which has been frequently cited as one of the most successful cases of transition economies in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Despite the costs related to the break-up of Czechoslovakia in late 1992 and 1993, the immediate consequences were quickly...

The paper discusses the relative importance of the 'real' political actions versus the changes of symbolic nature in the bargaining over devolution, studying the case of personnel decentralization in security agencies in Russia in 2000-2007. While in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin regional...