This paper reviews the political economy view of economic growth in post-communist economies making the transition to free markets, focusing on the role of economic policy and institutions. We test the hypothesis that better institutions, measured in terms of economic freedom, contribute to...

We relate household saving to pension reform, to explain the high household saving rates in urban China from a new perspective. We use the exogenous - policy induced - variation in pension wealth to explicitly estimate the impact of pension wealth on household saving, and obtain a significant...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of corruption in bank lending. Corruption is expected to hamper bank lending, as it is closely related to legal enforcement, which has been shown to promote banks' willingness to lend. Nevertheless the similarities between the consequences for bank...

This study seeks to determine the extent to which countries of the former Soviet Union are "infected" by the Dutch Disease. We take a detailed look at the functioning of the trans-mission mechanism of the Dutch Disease, i.e. the chains that run from commodity prices to real output in...

This research examines the connection between a country's export structure and corruption, incorporating disaggregated data on exports for a recent time period over a large set of nations. We ask whether various types of exports (e.g. agricultural, mineral, manufacturing and fuel) exert similar...

We assess the effects of oil price shocks on real exchange rate and output in four large energy-producing countries: Iran, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, and Russia. We estimate four-variable structural vector autoregressive models using standard long-run restrictions. Not surprisingly, we find that...

This paper considers whether local bank participation exerts an impact on the spreads for syndicated loans in Russia. Following Berger, Klapper and Udell (2001), we test whether local banks possess a superior ability to deal with information asymmetries. Using a sample of 528 syndicated loans to...

In this paper we analyse the impact of R&D on total factor productivity across Chinese provinces. We introduce innovations explicitly into a production function and evaluate their contribution to economic growth in 1993 - 2006. The empirical results highlight the importance and the interaction...

We collect data from 29 separate papers estimating the equilibrium level and possible undervaluation of the Chinese currency, the renminbi. These papers yield a total of 97 individual observations on misalignment, which we analyse with the help of meta-analysis. We find that the vast majority of...