How does persecution affect who migrates? We analyze migrants' self-selection out of the USSR and its satellite states before and after the collapse of Communism using census microdata from the three largest destination countries: Germany, Israel, and the United States. We find that migrants...

In a multiperiod investment framework, firms with high expected growth earn higher expected returns than firms with low expected growth, holding investment and expected profitability constant. This paper forms cross-sectional growth forecasts, and constructs an expected growth factor that yields...

The main focus of this paper is on the process and progress of economic reform in Russia. But I start with four historical questions that bear on the current situation. How advanced was Russia in 1913? What relevance, if any, does the New Economic Policy of the 19205, or NEP, have for the...

This paper combines national accounts, survey, wealth and fiscal data (including recently released tax data on high-income taxpayers) in order to provide consistent series on the accumulation and distribution of income and wealth in Russia from the Soviet period until the present day. We find...

Some of the leading theories of momentum have different empirical predictions about its profitability conditional on market composition and structure. The overconfidence explanation provided by Daniel, Hirshleifer, and Subrahmanyam (1998), for example, predicts lower momentum profits in markets...

This paper studies structural transformation of Soviet Russia in 1928-1940 from an agrarian to an industrial economy through the lens of a two-sector neoclassical growth model. We construct a large dataset that covers Soviet Russia during 1928-1940 and Tsarist Russia during 1885-1913. We use a...

Can efforts to eradicate inequality in wealth and education eliminate intergenerational persistence of socioeconomic status? The Chinese Communist Revolution in the 1950s and Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 aimed to do exactly that. Using newly digitized archival records and contemporary...

This study constructs a large new dataset to investigate whether state policy led to ethnic Ukrainians experiencing higher mortality during the 1932-33 Soviet Great Famine. All else equal, famine (excess) mortality rates were positively associated with ethnic Ukrainian population share across...

This paper studies the causal effect of technology and knowledge transfers on early industrial development. Between 1950 and 1957, the Soviet Union supported the "156 Projects" in China for the construction of technologically advanced, large-scale, capital-intensive industrial facilities. We...

In many countries of the world the co-residence of young adults aged 25-34 with their parents is not uncommon and in some countries the savings rates of these age groups exceed those of the middle-aged contrary to the standard model of life-cycle savings. In this paper we examine the role of...