How does regulatory capture affect growth? We construct measures of the political power of firms and regional regulatory capture using micro-level data on the preferential treatment of firms through regional laws and regulations in Russia during the period 1992-2000. Using these measures, we...

The paper provides evidence that the welfare effect of decentralization in countries with weak democratic institutions depends on the multi-jurisdictional vs. single-jurisdictional span of interest group lobbies. Weak democracy leads to capture of local authorities. Captors who have...

The purpose of the paper is two-fold. The paper compares productivity of Russian firms that received foreign direct investments, and fully domestically owned firms. It also analyses spillovers from foreign-owned firms to domestic firms. Foreign firms are found to be more productive than the...

We enhance the theory of asymptotic inference about predictive ability by considering the case when a set of variables used to construct predictions is sizable. To this end, we consider an alternative asymptotic framework where the number of predictors tends to innity with the sample size,...

We develop a theory of control rights in the context of licensing interim innovative knowledge for further development, which is consistent with the inalienability of initial innovator's intellectual property rights (IPR). Control rights of a downstream development unit, a buyer of the interim...

When governments care about tax revenues, the taxability of different forms of economic activity will influence the decisions of governments about what activity to support. If factors of production are mobile across sectors which differ in their taxability, political economies will organize...

Laws that work well in developed market economies may produce unexpected outcomes in a corrupt environment. The paper argues that the Russian legal system is impaired by the capture of regional arbitration courts and analyzes the consequences of this capture for functioning of bankruptcy...

In an economy with weak economic and political institutions, the major institutional choices are made strategically by oligarchs and dictators. The conventional wisdom presumes that as rent-seeking is harmful for oligarchs themselves, institutions such as enforcement of the property rights will...

Rapidly changing technologies and the growing openness of economies to international trade sometimes make entire occupations in the countries affected redundant. People employed in these occupations have to switch to other occupations that they do not necessarily like. Such “forced”...

There is increasing evidence that broad measures of firm-level corporate governance predict higher share prices. However, almost all prior work relies on cross-sectional data. This work leaves open the possibility that endogeneity or omitted firm-level variables explain the observed...