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...

East Germany remains unique among the transition economies. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. German Union meant the transplantation of West Germany's legal, administrative and economic infrastructure to the five new Länder. The...

We argue that econometric analyses based on transition countries’ data can be vulnerable to structural breaks across time and/or countries. We demonstrate this argument by identifying structural breaks in growth regressions estimated with data for 25 countries and 16 years. Our method allows...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted for Soviet Russia assuming that it was the Gulag not unemployment that acted as a ‘worker-discipline device’. Archival data now available allows for a basic account of the dynamics of the Gulag to be estimated....

This paper tests whether there is a macroeconomic cost of a reform reversal during transition. A reform reversal is defined as a downgrading in the level of an average reform indicator. This is important both from an empirical and a theoretical point of view. In the standard empirical framework...

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...

This paper tests whether there is a macroeconomic cost of a reform reversal during transition. A reform reversal is defined as a downgrading in the level of an average reform indicator. In the standard empirical framework the current level of reform affects growth negatively, while the lagged...

This paper uses previous empirical work to simulate the impact on real economic growth of the big bang and gradualist approaches to reform. Uncertainty concerning the appropriate reform steps introduces the possibility of reform reversals. We find that higher expected probabilities of reversal...

How does the effect “state capture” depend the identity of the captor? We use a dataset on preferential treatment of selected firms by regional legislature and regulatory agencies in transitional Russia to show that the most effective and the least benign captors are “federal oligarchs”...