Contrary to the claim of Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny (1994), it is conceivable under market socialism to take firms out of the orbit of state control and that a less narrow theory of the state than theirs allows the possibility of democratic socialism mitigating problems of economic...

This paper develops a general equilibrium model and proposes a theory to explain the main stylized facts about the growth of barter transactions in Russia during the 1990s. Because of the high opportunity cost of using fiat money, with a tight enough credit market it may be optimal for firms to...

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...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...

East Germany remains unique among the transition economies. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. German Union meant the transplantation of West Germany's legal, administrative and economic infrastructure to the five new Länder. The...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

The adjustment of labour markets during transition has been quite different from that anticipated by the Optimal Speed of Transition (OST) literature. In particular, it has involved stagnant unemployment pools, large flows to inactivity and strikingly low workers' mobility especially when...