The spectre of populism is haunting Europe and the West, but what is driving this populism? In this paper we look at the implications of the Great Recession on voting for anti-establishment parties, as well as for general trust and political attitudes, using regional data across Europe. Our...

We study firm dynamics in Korea before and after the 1997-98 Asian crisis and pro-competitive reforms that reduced the dominance of chaebols. We find that in industries that were dominated by chaebols before the crisis, labor productivity and TFP of non-chaebol firms increased markedly after the...

Using newly available data, we re-evaluate the impact of transition from plan to market on objective and subjective well-being. We find clear evidence of the high social cost of early transition reforms: cohorts born around the start of transition are shorter than their older or younger peers....

How does international trade affect the popularity of government and leaders? Using data covering 118 countries and nearly 450,000 individuals, we show that attitudes towards globalisation depend on both individuals' skill levels and the skill intensity of the country's exports and imports. Our...

Scholars have long argued that social trust contributes to economic growth and development. This paper looks at the relationship between income and trust by taking data from Russia, where GDP dropped by 8 per cent in 2009. We find that a drop in income is associated with a decrease in social...

Why are inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs) failing to be privatised? This paper takes the concept of the soft budget constraint (introduced by János Kornai) and applies it to state capitalism – that is, where the state owns major production assets but doesn't interfere in price...

The “transition happiness gap” has been one of the most robust findings in the life satisfaction literature. Until very recently, scholars using various datasets on life satisfaction have shown that residents of post-communist countries were significantly less satisfied with their lives than...

Does state ownership hinder or help firms access credit? We use data on almost 4 million firms in 89 countries to study the relationship between state ownership and corporate leverage. Controlling for country-sector-year fixed effects and conventional firm-level determinants of leverage, we show...

We study the impact of the recent migration crisis on entrepreneurship in transit countries using a unique locality-level panel from the 2010 and 2016 rounds of the Life in Transition Survey for 18 European countries. To capture the exogenous variation in exposure to transit migration, we...

We empirically investigate the relationship between corruption and growth using a firm-level data set that is unique in scale, covering almost 88,000 firms across 141 economies in 2006-2020, with wideranging corruption experiences. The scale and detail of our data allow us to explore the...