Studies of mass support for economic reform reveal a simple conclusion: Everyone hates privatization. Yet whether respondents hold this view due to a preference for state property or concerns about the legitimacy of privatization is unclear. We test these arguments using a 2006 survey of 28,000...

Degrees in Technology, Law or Economics are Better Rewarded by the Market (from ?Beyond Transition?).

The main objectives of this paper are to estimate the burden of tobacco-caused mortality as a whole and by main tobacco-related diseases in Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine, and to assess the distributional health impact of an increase in tobacco taxation in these three countries....

The paper uses a unique survey of recruitment firms to look at how Russian firms perceive the supply of skills in the labour market and how well those skills match to their demand for labour. Firms invest significant amounts of time in search to fill vacancies and search time is unambiguously...

Using survey data from 28 transition countries, we test for the complementarity and substitutability of market-relevant skills and institutions. We show that democracy and good governance complement market skills in transition economies. Under autocracy and weak governance institutions there is...

By analyzing individual-level data on the alcohol consumption of Russian males, this paper finds evidence for a longstanding persistence of habits towards certain type of habit-forming goods. Males who grew up in the USSR are accustomed to vodka – the most popular liquor during the Soviet era...

The paper studies the role visa restrictions play in determining export flows between Russian firms and their partners and explores the mechanism of this relationship. The specification of empirical model is derived from a heterogeneous firms’ model of trade. The existing visa restrictions are...

In early 2000s Japan introduced a special version of an inpatient prospective payment system (PPS) that contains incentives to increase efficiency and shorten the average length of stay (ALOS). This paper presents a theoretical model, which explains heterogeneous dynamics of volume and quality...

For the last twenty years Russia has confronted the Mortality Crisis- the life expectancy of Russian males has fallen by more than five years, and the mortality rate has increased by 50%. Alcohol abuse is widely agreed to be the main cause of this change. In this paper, I use a rich dataset on...

We document that contribution of identified US monetary shock to exchange rate variability differs across currencies and is inversely related to the degree of a country’s US dollar exchange rate pass-through into import prices. We explore this empirical pattern under the assumption that each...