A bank can be viewed as a firm that uses deposits as inputs to “produce” loans and investments. If a manager does all her best, the bank affords its production possibilities frontier. However, the manager’s incentives may not go in-line with those of the bank’s owners, and this leads to...

The project focuses on the contemporary state of five Russian macro-regions - European Russia, the Urals, Western Siberia, Eastern Siberia and the Far East - and their immediate perspectives for trade and economic integration in both an inter-regional and an international context. The study uses...

Inefficient management is considered as a major factor responsible both for bank failures and X-inefficiency. Using data from financial statements of largest Russian banks for the period immediately preceeding the August 1998 crisis, we tested the hypothesis that the past level of X-inefficiency...

The study was aimed at forecasting interest rates of the Russian government securities. The system of simultaneous equations was constructed, including as endogenous variables GKO interest rate, interest rate for Russian currency securities, Central Bank refinancing rate, and expected exchange...

This paper employs the data from Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to study human capital determinants of wage and employment changes from 1992 to 1996. We analyze how returns to schooling are changing over the transition period in Russia. The evidence shows that at the beginning of...

This paper focuses on persistent poverty in Russia and determines the main micro and macro factors that cause a household to be persistently poor. As potential correlators of persistent poverty, main demographic, socio-economic and regional characteristics of a household, as well as the...

The Russian economy has evolved into a hybrid form, a partially monetized quasi-market system that has been called the virtual economy. In the virtual economy, barter and non-monetary transactions play a key role in transferring value from productive activities to the natural monopolies and...

The share of antidumping investigations against transition economies in the total number of investigations increased from 20 to over than 40 percent during the last decade. There are two opposite explanations of this trend among economists. One group argues that the growth of antidumping...

This empirical research aims to test for the presence of opportunistic electoral business cycles in Ukraine. National and regional-level data on budget revenues and expenditures, output, unemployment rate, wages, and wage arrears (and prices, subject to the availability of data) will be...

This project analyzes whether Russian farms operate under liquidity constraints or under soft budget constraints. A production function that utilizes the concept of total factor productivity will be used. Incorporation of financial variables in the production function will allow analyzing their...