Media revenues are an important determinant of media behavior. News coverage depends not only on the preferences of media consumers but also on the preferences of advertisers or subsidizing groups. We present a theoretical model of the interaction between special interest groups and media...

In the late 1980s, the vast majority of Russians supported pro-Western economic and political transformation. Although transition to market and democracy has eventually delivered economic benefits, most Russians are now skeptical about Western economic and political values. In this article we...

The goal of this paper is to offer a non-technical interpretation of the “Great Divergence” and “Great Convergence” stories. After reviewing existing explanations in the literature, I offer a different interpretation. Western countries exited the Malthusian trap by destroying traditional...

This paper joins the literature examining connections between legal protection of shareholders and finance. Driven by the need to attract funds a manager tries to reduce agency costs by selling a fraction of equity to a large investor (the outside blockholder). Monitoring by the blockholder can...

We study the nature of career concerns of regional leaders in Soviet Russia under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. We document a substantial over-time variation in career concerns associated with reforms of Soviet governing hierarchy. We demonstrate that Khrushchev’s “Sovnarkhoz” system—a unique...

Using individual data from RLMS, the longitudinal survey of the representative sample of the Russian population, we study static and dynamic models of demand for alcohol. We show the demand curve has traditional negative slope for any type of alcoholic drink: vodka, beer, and wine. We find...

Governments that levy predatory regulation and provide few weak legal institutions draw businesses into the unofficial economy and compel them to hire private protection organizations. Based on a survey of shopkeepers in three cities in Russia, we find that retail shops face very high levels of...

This paper studies the asymptotic validity of the Anderson-Rubin (AR) test and the J test of overidentifying restrictions in linear models with many instruments. When the number of instruments increases at the same rate as the sample size, we establish that the conventional AR and J tests are...

Much theory of the state assumes a contractual relationship between state and society, where the former provides services valued by the latter, typically in return for revenues. However, as emphasized by many scholars, various transaction costs endemic to state-society relations may prevent the...

This paper studies the use of discretionary rewards in a finitely repeated principal-agent relationship with moral hazard. We show that the principal, when she obtains a private subjective signal about the agent’s performance, may pay discretionary bonuses to provide credible feedback to the...