We consider the problem of finding sufficient conditions for political support of liberal, growth-enhancing policy in a quality-ladders model with heterogeneous agents differing in their endowment of wealth and skills. The policy set is two-dimensional: Agents vote for the level of...

The Russian Constitutional Court (RCC) has over time developed a practice of adopting so-called “positive dismissals” (Pozitivnoe Opredelenie) which complements (but also undermines) the existent formal procedure of only delivering decisions on merits with Rulings (Postanovlenie). The paper...

Economic crises are expected to erode domestic political support for the existing regime. However, in comparison with democracies, autocracies enjoy more of a leeway responding to economic downturns due to their ability to strengthen their clientelist ties and increase the level of repression...

In my paper I analyze why some top-level public administrators invite a peer review to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of their agencies while others do not. A peer review is a light-touch voluntary benchmarking exercise conducted by a group of critical friends (peers). I propose a...

The influence of lobbying activity on economic growth and welfare is widely observed in the literature. Many scholars consider lobbying as a sort of rent-seeking and blame it for non-optimal redistribution of assets, additional costs for firms, and resource reallocation from productive...

When property rights are poorly secured, crony relations i.e. the tight connection between the owners of major firms and the government are the primary informal mechanism securing the property. However, this institutional framework creates high entry barriers on markets. We propose a theory that...

Correct aggregation of individual preferences into collective one is central problem of nowadays Social Choice theory. After the Arrow's and Gibbard–Satterthwaite impossibility theorems it became clear that our desire to justify an electoral procedure is doomed to failure. At the same time a...

How do political connections shape the propensity of firms to make investments in weakly institutionalized settings? Traditionally, absent ways to hold the state accountable, firms should withhold investment for fear of predation. An emerging body of work on the political economy of investment...

The Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) is the first and relatively successful attempt to establish strong multilateral institutions of post-Soviet regional integration. The EAEU has greater scope of supranationalism compared to all previous post-Soviet integration projects and the Union's...

The article deals with relevant problems of determination of the objective limits of the prejudgment using the prejudgment of the particular types of court rulings as an example. The author concludes that the concept of «circumstances» should be defined as facts and established on their basis...