This paper reports first results from a survey of 404 middle-sized and large manufacturing firms from 40 Russian regions in April-June 2003. We examine the extent of social service and infrastructure provision by the firms and the firms’ assessment of the quality of public infrastructure and...

This paper reports first results from a survey of 404 middle-sized and large manufacturing firms from 40 Russian regions in April-June 2003. We examine the extent of social service and infrastructure provision by the firms and the firms’ assessment of the quality of public infrastructure and...

Russian industrial enterprises inherited from the Soviet era a tradition of producing welfare and infrastructure services within the firm, also for outside users. Despite the massive restructuring of the economy that took place since, many firms are still active in service provision. At the same...

We introduce endogenous time preference via investment in patience (farsightedness) in an overlapping generations growth model to study development traps. There is no investment in patience, if the economy is very poor, while if it is wealthy enough there is always such investment. We explore...

The standard model of international trade based on Dixit-Stiglitz theory of monopolistic competition originally developed by Helpman and Krugman is extended to allow for costly search and matching between producers of different varieties and retailers. This extension provides a new way of...