This paper provides causal evidence of flexible operating strategies a¤ecting capital structure of firms. I exploit the appealing setting of the European labor market to show that the use of employment contracts that provide firms with a greater operating flexibility in terms of less costly...

The paper assesses the impact of urbanization on the quality related outcomes of social health insurance systems in 85 Russian regions in 2000-2006. The results of parametric and kernel regressions reveal that controlling for regional income is a significant determinant of infant and under-five...

This paper studies the effect of poor governance quality on foreign direct investment in Russia. Using a survey of businesses across forty administrative districts, we find that higher frequency of using illegal payments and higher pressure from regulatory agencies, enforcement authorities, and...

To study the potentially distortionary impact of differing corporate income tax rates on international trade flows, we use an augmented empirical specification of the gravity model. Incorporating an asymmetric trade barrier measure into a modified gravity model, we capture the impact of...

Transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union introduced social health insurance (SHI) to foster universal coverage, stable financing revenues, and consumer euity through a principle of solidarity. In particular, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Russia...

Recent empirical research suggests that country-level and firm-level governance institutions are substitutes with respect to their effect on firm value. In this paper we demonstrate that these institutions may become complements once we look at the decline in firm’s value during a crisis....

An important aspect of property rights is specificity, the ability of a third party to enforce rights. The empirical literature rarely isolates the effect of specificity because exogenous changes, due to land reforms, either simultaneously change both control and specificity or exclusively...

Reasoning that private firm-specific information causes firm-specific return variation that drives down market-model R2s, Morck, Yeung, and Yu (2000) begin a large body of research which interprets R2 as an inverse measure of price informativeness. Low R2s or “synchronicity,” as it is called...

We propose a new adequacy test and a graphical evaluation tool for nonlinear dynamic models. The proposed techniques can be applied in any setup where parametric conditional distribution of the data is specified, in particular to models involving conditional volatility, conditional higher...

Commonly used trade-weighted real exchange rate indices are computed as indices-of-indices, and thus do not adequately account for growth in trade with developing countries. Weighted Average Relative Price (WARP) indices solve this problem but do not control for productivity differences, as...