The paper is a survey of literature and statistical sources on poverty and inequality in Russia in the 1990s and the 2000s. It serves as a background to OECD (2011), the OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Review of the Russian Federation that was released in 2011. We start with an overview of...

Institutions are now widely believed to be important in explaining performance. In this paper, we analyze whether commonly used measures of institutions have any significant, measurable impact on performance, whether of countries or firms. We look at three 'levels' of institutions and associated...

The paper looks at the effects of employment concentration on resource allocation with a particular focus on one-company towns in Russia defined as towns where a single company accounts for a significant share of total employment of the locality. Empirical analysis of firms' production functions...

We study selection and labour market outcomes among Ukrainian migrants using unique data from a survey conducted in Ukraine in August – October 2011. We find that migrants are positively selected in terms of age and education. Yet, this is not associated, as might be expected, with their...

Political networks are an important feature of the political and economic landscape of countries. Despite their ubiquity and significance, information on such networks has proven hard to collect due to a pervasive lack of transparency. However, with the advent of big data and artificial...

It is widely accepted that the costs of under-pricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors –...