This study measures the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the productivity of local firms. Unlike earlier studies, our empirical approach does not require that FDI manifests immediate or permanent effects. We find that foreign entry initially affects productivity of local competitors...

We analyse how the choice of reform speed and economic growth affect one another. We estimate a system of three equations where economic growth, economic reform and FDI are jointly determined. New reforms affect economic growth negatively, whereas the level of past reform leads to higher growth...

State-owned banks tend to increase lending before elections for the purpose of boosting the reelection odds of incumbent politicians. We employ monthly data on individual banks to study whether Russian banks increased their lending before presidential elections during 2004–2019, a period...

We analyze whether a depositor's familiarity with a bank affects depositor behavior during a financial crisis. Familiarity is measured by the presence of regional or local cues in the bank's name, while depositor behavior is considered in terms of depositor sensitivity to observable bank risk...

This paper examines the effect of banking on economic growth in modern Russia. To overcome simultaneity and selection, we exploit regional banking variation induced by the creation of 'specialized banks' (spetsbanks) in the last years of the Soviet Union (1988-1991). Consistent with the...

We explore how the introduction of explicit deposit insurance affects deposit flows into and out of banks of varying risk levels. Using evidence from a natural experiment in Russia, we employ a difference-in-difference estimator to isolate the change in the deposit flows of a newly insured group...

Russia's tremendous inter-regional variation in the pace of industrial land rights reform has meant that geography has helped determine the current tenure status of firms' production plots as much as any individual firm characteristics. By exploiting both this difference in the pace with which...

Using evidence from Russia, we explore the effect of the introduction of deposit insurance on bank risk. Drawing on within-bank variation in the ratio of firm deposits to total household and firm deposits, so as to capture the magnitude of the decrease in market discipline after the introduction...

We suggest an additional transmission channel of contagion on the interbank market - the liquidity channel. Examining the Russian banking sector, we and that the liquidity channel contributes significantly to understanding and predicting interbank market crises. Interbank market stability...

We study whether bank efficiency is related to bank ownership in Russia. We find that foreign banks are more efficient than domestic private banks and - surprisingly - that domestic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...