The accumulation of human capital is usually considered an important corner stone in a country's economic development. While the use of resource rents to improve an educational system and, thus, increase the level of human capital appears to be an attractive option, resource rich economies...

Which incentives have the strongest impact on the size of the shadow economy? Is it about government's pressure against entrepreneurs operating in this sector, or is it about the benefits of legality? The goal of this paper is to explicitly contrast the role of sticks (court repressiveness) and...

This article considers the impact of sub-national political systems on economic growth by applying the case of Russian regions from 2000 to 2004. It investigates two dimensions of the sub-national systems. First, it studies the influence of democracy on economic performance, providing evidence...

This article uses the informal governance framework to elucidate the connection between regime transition and participation in regional international organizations (IOs). In particular, this study focuses on non-democratic regional IOs and examines the empirical case of the Commonwealth of...

The paper investigates the role of judiciary behavior in the development of SMEs in Russian regions. Specifically, it looks at how repressive Russian courts are in punishing economic crime. Repressiveness of courts can be both an obstacle of business development (if it serves the predatory...

This article investigates the effect of economic crises on the development of post-Soviet regional integration, focusing on Russia-Kazakhstan relations and particularly the case of the Belarus, Russia and Kazakhstan customs union. While the literature often argues that crises are accompanied by...

The paper investigates the influence of outside options on the predatory behavior of autocrats. An outside option is referred to as the opportunity of an incumbent ruler to continue his career outside his current territory of control. The paper uses data on the effectiveness of tax collection...

This working paper contains supplementary material to the paper Communism or Communists? Soviet Legacies and Corruption in Transition Economies. The supplementary material covers the description of calculation and sources of key variables, as well as reports summary statistics and provides...

The paper provides a survey of theoretical and empirical literature on non-linear impact of democracy on economic growth. First, it looks at two main approaches to the non-linearity: the U-shape and the inverse U-shape. Then it proceeds by looking at the specifics of hybrid regimes and tries to...

The paper investigates the current status of economic research in Russia using a previously unexplored dataset of Russian ‘Doctor of Science’ (Dr.Sc.) theses. The Dr.Sc. degree is a postdoctoral qualification necessary for career advancement at most Russian universities. By examining the...