The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behavior of...

In this paper we survey the common explanations of barter in transition economies and expose them to detailed survey data on 165 barter deals in Ukraine in 1997. The evidence does not support the notion that soft budget constraints, lack of restructuring, or that the virtual economy are the...

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behavior of...

The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behaviour of...

This paper investigates the impact of institutional reform in the form of anticorruption on corporate investment decision-making in Vietnam, a country characterized by a socialist-orientation economy and the dominance of the public sector. Analysing different firm datasets of during 2006-2019,...

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for i.a. a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has - among other things - been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality...

In this paper we use rich panel data for a representative sample of Estonian enterprises to analyse diverse issues related to the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes after privatisation. A key focus is to determine whether ownership changes are related to economic...

The rise of barter and non-cash payments has become a dominant feature of the Russian transition to a market economy. This paper confronts with empirical evidence two approaches to explain barter in Russia: the ’illusion view’ and the ’trust view’ of barter. The...

This paper is a reply to Barry Ickes' critique of my paper “Trust versus Illusion: What is Driving Demonetization in Russia?†in which I show that the data reject Barry Ickes' Virtual Economy explanation of barter in Russia in favor of an institutional explanation based on the lack of...