The authors apply the single-index Sharp model and construct the effective Markowitz set for the most liquid stocks of Russian companies listed in the Russian Trading System. Their stability during 1996-98 is studied for various investment horizons.

When designing a trade policy reform, government of a transition country faces the problem of minimizing both trade distortions and losses in tariff revenues. One possible solution of this problem is tariff unification, which undermines stimuli for tariff evasion and thus saves budget revenues....

The observable outcomes of post-Soviet economic reforms have generated large interest and controversy in the transition debate. Privatization and market competition are the two primary forces to induce changes in the firm behavior. The author investigates how firm performance responds to these...

T-bills were introduced in 1995 and are still one of the most important instruments of the securities market of Armenia (85-95% of all operations of the secondary market in the last five years). The maturity yield of the state bonds during the last 7 years has been between 20% to 100%. Despite...

Panic and a massive withdrawal of deposits triggered by an expectation of bankruptcy may force the bank to sell off valuable assets, causing sizeable losses and, in some cases, closure of an initially healthy financial institution. The traditional way of preventing bank runs has to do with the...

The paper analyzes a spatial pattern of goods market integration in Russia, and characterizes the movement of the national market as a whole to integration. By the spatial pattern is meant a state of each individual region of the country: whether it is integrated, and if not, whether it moves...

The goal of this project is the explanation of spatial distribution of investment in Russia during the transition to a market economy. The influence of agglomeration and investor expectations on investment in the real sector of the economy are analyzed. A theoretical model is constructed, which...

In a restructuring economy on-the-job training plays important role not only in raising the general level of human capital but in retooling workers for the new sectors of economy. The amount of on-the-job training in Russia has however been unsatisfactorily low compared to other countries. Main...

Consider a “linear world” populated by several agents. These agents’ locations are identified with optimal variety of a horizontally differentiated local public good. Agents are to be partitioned into several communities (hereafter, groups), and each group chooses a variety of public good...

More than half of all Russian banks have gone bankrupt since the beginning of commercial banking in Russia ten years ago. It is poor macroeconomic environment that is usually blamed for banking crises. However we think that excessive risk-taking by banks themselves contributed a lot to their...