Despite the unified system of admission to universities in Russia, applicants can still face unequal access to higher education. This can lead to an inefficient choice of the educational strategy and result in the increased inequality. This paper analyzes the barriers which restrict the...

This paper explores the relationship between the degree of competition between higher education institutions (HEIs) and the efficiency of regional higher education systems using evidence from the Russian Federation. The choice of the regional system of higher education as a unit of analysis is...

How do firms decide between different strategies for acquiring highly skilled workers? Ronald Coase (1937) famously argued that firms face trade-offs between “making” required inputs within the firm and contracting with outside actors to “buy” them. Similar trade-offs abound in deciding...

We analyse the professional community of attorneys in Russia in order to understand their potential for collective action in an imperfect institutional environment. In 2013 we conducted a survey of 372 attorneys in 9 regions of Russia. Two main hypotheses are tested: 1) lawyers with strong...

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...

Recently, many matching systems around the world have been reformed. These reforms responded to objections that the matching mechanisms in use were unfair and manipulable. Surprisingly, the mechanisms remained unfair even after there forms: the new mechanisms may induce an out come with a...

This article presents the results of a study on Russian education policy. It explores how compulsory and secondary education meet contemporary social challenges, and how they should be adjusted to account for acute social inequality. The authors present evidence of the growing social...

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on...

One of the attributes most consistently highlighted in the literature on frontier society is the tendency to spontaneous social organisation. However, despite the resilience of the ‘frontier thesis' within sociology and political science, it has not been subject to a rigorous empirical...

The paper proposes an outline for the link between two theoretical perspectives on the prerequisites of high institutional quality and long run growth. One framework is based on the tradeoff between disorder and dictatorship and introduces the notion of the institutional possibility frontier,...