We use a new independent survey of 4,000 Russian households (the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey or RLMS) to study their saving behavior. The RLMS household saving rate (12%) is less than half the official figure (29%). Despite the massive changes of the transition, the Russian household...

This study makes two contributions to the quantity-constraint literature. First, it investigates the effects of consumer-market shortage on labor supply. Second, it considers the effects on hours of work of eliminating quantity constraints in a planned socialist economy. The estimated model of...

This paper shows that inter-regulatory competition can have powerful pro-consumer effects in an open economy world even when the consumers have little political influence. These findings overturn the welfare implications of capture theories that show that regulators do not vigorously pursue...