Tunneling behavior, which is defined as the transfer of assets and profits out of a firm for the benefit of the firms controlling shareholders, has become the focus of increasing attention in the theoretical and empirical literature. There are some corporate governance procedures, however, that...

This dissertation contains three essays that combine applied models, institutional analysis and empirical work in order to understand developments in the Russian and Caspian energy sector following the breakup of the former Soviet Union. In the first essay entitled Partial Privatization:...