This paper is based on the author’s lecture given at the Russian Summer School on Institutional Analysis 2007, organized by the State University — Higher School of Economics with the financial support of Innovation educational program. The author defines a reform as an intentional...

This paper analyzes economic policies in resource rich countries and various mechanisms of resource curse leading to a potentially inefficient use of resources. Arguments are provided in favor of "conditional resource curse" hypothesis: resource abundance hampers growth if institutions of a...

One of the main obstacles for successful economic development is the formation of institutional traps, inefficient yet stable norms of behaviour. Domination of barter exchange, arrears, corruption and black market activities are examples of institutional traps that have hampered reforms in...

The Russian labor market was characterized with three main features: a weak sensitivity of employment levels to changing conditions, a high variability of wage, large inter-firm flows of labor resources. This paper recommends a model of a collective firm explaining these phenomena. The main...

This is the first part of the research devoted to the problem of the choice of institutional reform strategies. A strategy is defined as a planned trajectory of institutional changes in time. Three types of strategies are compared: shock therapy, gradual growing, and interim institution...

Transplantation of institutions is an important part of reforms in many developing and transition economies. However, principles and methods of transplantation are not developed and therefore many transplantation attempts failed. This is a case for numerous projects of accelerated building the...

The economic "battle" that took place in Russia in 1992 consisted of the struggle between the liberally-oriented government and the labor collectives, the latter of which regarded the government's reform program as an attempt to encroach upon the established system of collective property. The...

We discuss the typical mistakes in carrying out reforms that promote redistributive activities and give rise to redistribution cycles; each cycle includes the stages of reform, stabilization and recovery. We provide arguments that show that a possible way out of the institutional backwardness...

Consider an economy with n resources (goods) and m agents, and let initial resource allocation be given. We ask if it is possible to build a mutually beneficial bargaining sequence that approaches an optimal resource allocation even though a) only k ≤ n agents participates at each step of the...

We develop a turnpike theory for a class of dynamic general equilibrium models where total demand function satisfy monotonicity conditions. As special cases, we receive well known results about asymptotic behavior of optimal paths.