Chinese companies sometimes appoint a government official (bureaucrat) as CEO on the expectation of benefiting from the political connections of the new hire. Based on a sample of 2,454 CEO transitions our empirical findings are consistent with the implications of a simple contract model in...

​This paper studies exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices in Ukraine and Russia considering cross-country linkage and spillover effects. We relax the assumption of "isolated islands" and employ a bilateral panel VAR (BPVAR) approach to estimate a pass-through effect from the ruble to...

This paper examines the international transmission of financial shocks which originate in, and are partially offset by, quantitative easing in a large financially-stressed country. Using a two-country model, we evaluate the adjustment in the non-stressed home country, following recurring...

​This empirical study considers the pass-through of key nominal exchange rates and commodity prices to consumer prices in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), taking into account the effect of idiosyncratic and common factors influencing prices. In order to do that, given the...

Inefficiently organized, factory-dominated cityscapes have been one of the more enduring legacies of the twentieth century experiment with socialist central planning in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Drawing on a unique survey of large, formerly state-owned urban industrial firms in...

​This research investigates the determinants of corruption in China using micro-level data. We use survey data on 6,000 households from 28 provinces to estimate logit models that show how corruption perceptions and attitudes to corruption are shaped by individual and provincial determinants....

​This paper examines the governance role of banks in replacement of underperforming CEOs in firms listed on Chinese stock exchanges. Under most circumstances, the findings suggest that the presence of outstanding loans does not increase the probability that a poorly performing CEO will be...

We examine how regional-level political influence affects firm financial performance and survival. Combining representative survey data on mid-sized manufacturing firms in Russia with official registry data, we find that politically influential firms exhibit higher profitability and retain...

Reference to gender in language can lead individuals to draw distinctions between genders and re-inforce traditional views of gender roles. To test our hypothesis that language gender-marking exerts an influence on the gender gap in financial inclusion, we draw on data for 117 countries in the...