Although decentralization is often modeled as an outcome of bargaining over rents and policies, public statements, symbols and status have a great impact on this process as well. The paper studies the relative importance of “real” political actions versus changes of a symbolic nature in the...

We contribute to the rich literature on the role of political boundaries for international and inter-regional transactions by introducing a new methodology and testing it on an important case, China. This paper is based on new identification approach, which combines the use of sub-regional data...

The paper investigates the influence of outside options on the predatory behavior of autocrats. An outside option is referred to as the opportunity of an incumbent ruler to continue his career outside his current territory of control. The paper uses data on the effectiveness of tax collection...

The aim of the paper is to study the relation between the demand for human rights and for economic prosperity. It analyzes the demand not, as it is often done in the literature, from the “voice” perspective (political activity), but rather looks at the “exit” perspective (migration...

The accuracy of a tax return is usually interpreted as an outcome of the tax evasion decision by an individual. However, in non-democratic regimes with predatory blackmail tax systems it is possible that large sums voluntarily reported by influential politicians or businessmen may be used as...

Anti-Western conspiracies are frequently used by governments to strengthen their power. We investigate the impact of conspiracy thinking on expectations of collusion among individuals in Russia and China. For this purpose, we conduct a novel laboratory experiment to measure expectations of...

Russian Abstract: Доклад подготовлен в рамках постоянного проекта Центра интеграционных исследований ЕАБР «Мировой опыт региональной интеграции». Целью проекта...

A broad literature suggests that political regimes matter for the growth effect of natural resources. However, while several studies have concentrated on the difference between democracies and autocracies in this respect, an important topic overlooked so far is the differences between varieties...