Prepared for The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition, this essay examines the evolution of both institutions and economists' thinking on institutions during transition. Early in transition, institutions were virtually ignored in the majority of normative prescriptions, but were...

Inter-firm information exchange with respect to the reliability of trade partners may be unmediated in the sense that it involves direct communication between the personnel of two firms. Alternatively, this information flow may be channeled by or through an organization such as a trade...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework linking communist regime collapse and privatizing economic reforms. The framework permits us to explain why certain communist regimes lost their monopoly of political power while others have not. We show that the essential difference between...

Prepared for the "Handbook Of New Institutional Economics." Focusing on firm behavior, the paper examines the collapse of socialist institutions, the building of capitalist institutions, changing firm boundaries, transactional governance, corporate governance, and use of the legal system. The...

Belarusian economy has been stagnating in 2011-2015 after 15 years of a high annual average growth rate. In 2015, after four years of stagnation, the Belarusian economy slid into a recession, its first since 1996, and experienced both cyclical and structural recessions. Since 2015, the...

The post-communist transition in Europe and the former Soviet Union is one of the most important transformations in modern history. Changes were exceptionally large and it was not only political and economic systems which were affected: there were changes in social structures, new territorial...

Can a policy intervention in the stressful first year after a birth affect marital stability? We examine this question using a large expansion in maternity benefits in 1982 in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The program provided partially paid leave until the child's first...