We study whether Russian Financial-Industrial Groups facilitate access by Russian firms to investment finance. We compare firms which are members of official Financial Industrial Groups and/or are owned by a large Russian bank with a control set of large firms categorized by dispersed ownership...

This paper uses data from a large survey of firms across 26 transition countries to examine the determinants of trust in the transition process. We first introduce a new measure of trust between firms: the level of prepayment demanded by suppliers from their customers in advance of delivery....