This paper estimates the effect of institutions on economic performance using cross-city data from China. We argue that China's ongoing reforms are part of a long and circuitous historical transition from antiquity to modernity, which started about 150 years ago. Learning from Western countries...

This paper studies the origins and consequences of the Russian mafia (vory-v-zakone). I web scraped a unique dataset that contains detailed biographies of more than 5,000 mafia leaders operating in 15 countries of the (former) Soviet Union at some point between 1916 and 2017. Using this data, I...

Using data from 1996 to 2000, we investigate the effects of ownership, especially by a strategic foreign owner, on bank efficiency for eleven transition countries in an unbalanced panel consisting of 225 banks and 856 observations.Applying stochastic frontier estimation procedures, we compute...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania.Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...

Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman recently rendered a summary verdict on the post-Soviet Russian transition experience finding that the Federation had become a normal country with the west's assistance, and predicting that it would liberalize and develop further like other successful nations...

The paper looks into convergence of Russian institutions with those of other democratic, free-market-oriented states, and considers definitions of "normalcy" that incorporate the concepts of free market, democracy, and government efficiency.The author provides an estimate of Russia s...

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 domes-tic private banks are not more efficient than domestic public banks. These results are not driven by the choice of...

Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of cen-tral Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompa-nied by repeated bank crises....