We provide evidence of corruption in allocation of public procurement and assess its efficiency. Firms with procurement revenue increase tunneling around regional elections, whereas neither tunneling of firms without procurement revenue, nor legitimate business of firms with procurement exhibits...

Laws that work well in a country with the rule of law may produce unexpected outcomes in a corrupt environment. We argue that the Russian legal system is impaired by the capture of regional divisions of arbitrage courts, and analyze the consequences of this capture. Using a theoretical model and...

Based on a unique data set on Russian city budgets, this paper shows that revenue sharing between regional and local governments provides local governments with no incentive to increase tax base or provide public goods. Any change in local government's own revenues is almost entirely offset by...