In his 1962 NBER volume, Growth of Industrial Production in the Soviet Union, Warren Nutter writes about how the study of the Soviet economy was hamstrung by official secrecy and misinformation. Western economists were forced to rely on what Nutter called “Marco Polo economics” or...

Can a policy intervention in the stressful first year after a birth affect marital stability? We examine this question using a large expansion in maternity benefits in 1982 in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The program provided partially paid leave until the child's first...

Can a policy intervention in the stressful first year after a birth affect marital stability? We examine this question using a large expansion in maternity benefits in 1982 in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The program provided partially paid leave until the child's first...

This paper tests three hypotheses about the origins of the conflict which begun in 2014 in Ukraine, using the 1995-2011 World Values Surveys. First, a hypothesis that the economic situation of young fighting-age men in Eastern Ukraine worsened relative to that of young men in Russia during...

Recent empirical studies show that career advancement may be employed as a tool to improve the efficiency of a political hierarchy. This paper investigates whether the central authorities in the Russian Empire resorted to career advancement incentives to improve the performance of provincial...

Why even after the dramatic increase in inequality in the 1990s and after the emergence and enrichment of “oligarchs”, the alternative (leftist, social democratic) economic policies that could have improved material and social wellbeing of the majority of the population is not supported by...

The ability of socioeconomic survey data to forecast civil conflicts has been little tested. This paper employs the World Values Surveys to study the 1995-2011 evolution of economic conditions and subjective political and societal views in Ukraine. Changes over time in outcomes in the mainly...

We study the effect of exposure to communism (EC), a political-economic regime based on collectivist planning, on preferences for family supports, which we refer to as 'informal family insurance'. We exploit both cross-country and cohort variation in EC in a large sample of Central and Eastern...

Russian Abstract: Почему после резкого увеличения неравенства в 90-е годы прошлого века, после появления и стремительного обогащения олигархов, альтернативная (левая,...

We study the effect of exposure to communism (EC), a political-economic regime based on collectivist planning, on preferences for family supports, which we refer to as 'informal family insurance'. We exploit both cross-country and cohort variation in EC in a large sample of Central and Eastern...