The voluminous literature on the privatization of Russian industry overlooks, almost completely, the story of enterprise land rights – a story that does not jibe well with the standard narrative of post-Soviet reform. This paper explains the path that has led to significant inter-regional...

This article explores the inter-relationship of collective action within the business community, the nature of the political regime and the security of firms' property rights. Drawing on a pair of surveys recently administered in Russia, we present evidence that post-communist business...

This article links Russians' individual experiences during the late-Gorbachev and early-Yeltsin years to the beliefs those same individuals espoused in the Putin era, over a decade later. Drawing on questions, some of which are retrospective, from the first wave of the Life in Transition Survey,...

Using evidence from Russia, we explore the effect of the introduction of deposit insurance on bank risk. Drawing on within-bank variation in the ratio of firm deposits to total household and firm deposits, so as to capture the magnitude of the decrease in market discipline after the introduction...

Inefficiently organized, factory-dominated cityscapes have been one of the more enduring legacies of the twentieth century experiment with socialist central planning in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Drawing on a unique survey of large, formerly state-owned urban industrial firms in...

Russia's tremendous inter-regional variation in the pace of industrial land rights reform has meant that geography has helped determine the current tenure status of firms' production plots as much as any individual firm characteristics. By exploiting both this difference in the pace with which...

Drawing on a unique set of surveys, this article explores the question of whether Russia s post-communist business associations are generally antithetical to or supportive of the broad objectives of economic restructuring.Contrary to the most widely cited analysis as to the purposes of...

Why are some lobby groups less benign in their external effects than others? Nearly three decades ago, Mancur Olson (1982) proposed that less-encompassing lobby groups with their constituents collectively representing a narrow range of sectors are more apt to seek the types of subsidies,...

We explore how the introduction of explicit deposit insurance affects deposit flows into and out of banks of varying risk levels. Using evidence from a natural experiment in Russia, we employ a difference-in-difference estimator to isolate the change in the deposit flows of a newly insured group...

Decades of investment decisions by central planners left communist societies with structures of production ill-prepared for competitive markets. Their vulnerability to liberalization, however, varied across space. Similar to the effects identified in the “China shock” literature, we...