While the mainstream of economic development theory focuses on the efficiency of policy measures, the role of the credibility of these measures is rarely analyzed. In this paper we argue that in less developed countries the problem of establishing the credibility of policy measures is at least...

This paper analyzes land transactions between municipalities and private businesses based on official data and business surveys in 15 regions of the Russian Federation. Since the Russian Federation passed the new Land Code in 2001, land privatization has been officially encouraged by the federal...

We use two data sets to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms’ financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA), a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...