This paper examines the extent to which consumption in Russian households responds to exogenous income shocks. During the time period studied in this paper (1994 - 1998), Russia experienced two major economic crises. Both featured extreme movements in the real ruble-dollar exchange rate. The...

Business groups, which are ubiquitous in emerging market economies, balance the advantages of characteristics such as internal capital markets with the disadvantages such as inefficient internal distribution of resources and suppression of technological and other forms of innovativeness. In this...

This paper examines within-industry variation in labor productivity at the beginning of Russia's transition process in 1992, as well as regional variation in the percentage of firms that exhibit below industry average labor productivity. The main hypothesis is that industries and regions where a...

Countries making the transition to a market economy often experience an increase in corruption along with an increase in growth. This observation is puzzling in the context of current models, which emphasize the destructive nature of corruption. We present a model of corruption and reform which...

This paper investigates the consequences of imperfect and uneven factor market development for farm efficiency in rural China during transition. In particular, we estimate the extent to which an inverse relationship in farm productivity can be attributed to the administrative (instead of market)...

Privatization in Estonia has produced varied ownership configurations. This enables hypotheses on the productivity effects of different ownership forms to be tested. Findings are based on fixed effects production function models and are estimated using a large, random sample of firms. Depending...

Based on a principal-agent model, this paper investigates the organizational structure that made the El Salvador's primary school decentralization program (EDUCO program) successful. First, we employ the "augmented" reduced form educational production function by incorporating parents and...

A large number of countries have recently experienced competitive shocks: sudden increases in the role that market forces play in determining the evolution of various industries. In this paper, we study the implications of Poland's competitive shock for three elements of the structure of that...

This paper analyzes the relationship between a woman’s intrahousehold bargaining position and her welfare within marriage. Simultaneity problems common to the literature are overcome by using dowry to proxy for bargaining position. Omitted variable bias is addressed by using grain shocks in...