Recent empirical studies show that career advancement may be employed as a tool to improve the efficiency of a political hierarchy. This paper investigates whether the central authorities in the Russian Empire resorted to career advancement incentives to improve the performance of provincial...

This paper investigates the causal impact of direct cash transfers on health, well-being, and life satisfaction among adolescents in Russia during the pandemic years. We study an unanticipated introduction of a COVID-19 state support policy for families with children in the form of two one-off...

This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of manipulating coronavirus statistics in an authoritarian federation; in particular, we look at how the career concerns of local politicians and the regional free press determine the under-reporting of COVID-19 mortality at the...

We study the long-term economic legacy of highly-skilled minorities a century after their wholesale expulsion. Using mass expulsions of Armenian and Greek communities of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century as a unique natural experiment of history, we show that districts with greater...

It is commonly argued that crises open up a window of opportunity to implement policies that otherwise would not have the necessary political backing. The argument goes that the political cost of deep reforms declines as crises unravel structural problems that need to be urgently rectified and...