Since Aristotle, a vast literature has suggested that economic inequality has important political consequences. Higher inequality is thought to increase demand for government income redistribution in democracies and to discourage democratization and promote class conflict and revolution in...

The paper explores the public-private wage gap in the Russian economy over time and along the whole wage distribution. Using the RLMS-HSE panel data set, we examine how gaps at various points of wage distribution changed from 2005 to 2015 and present decompositions of the gaps into components...

Being the largest economy in the Eurasian region, Russia's labor market affects economic performance and well-being in several former Soviet countries. Over the period 2000–2017, the Russian labor market survived several deep crises and underwent substantial structural changes. Major shocks...

The study explores how wages grow with experience in the Russian Federation. In all available cross-sectional data, the trajectory of the observed wage–experience profile is flat, peaks early, and declines sharply afterwards. This shape looks puzzling since it differs starkly from that...

Contrary to the experiences of other countries, perceptions of job insecurity in Russia were not correlated with the rates of unemployment and the business cycle over the last decade. We develop the theoretical framework that predicts that the individual perceptions of job insecurity depend on...

Political business cycle theories tend to focus on one policy instrument or macroeconomic lever at a time. Efforts to find empirical evidence of opportunistic business cycles have turned up rather meager results. We suggest that these facts may be related. If ways of manipulating the economy to...

Informality is a defining characteristic of labor markets in developing and transition countries. This paper analyzes patterns of mobility across different forms of formal and informal employment in Russia. Using the RLMS household panel we estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model with...