Performance-based promotion schemes in administrative hierarchies have limitations. Chinese provincial leaders, despite facing strong career concerns, make different policy decisions depending on their career backgrounds. Provincial party secretaries who rose from low to high positions within...

A 2006 survey of 28,000 individuals in 28 post-communist countries reveals overwhelming support for revising privatization, but most respondents prefer to leave firms in private hands. We examine who wants to revise privatization and why. Respondents with poor human capital and few assets...

We document a very large increase in agricultural productivity, peasants’ living standards, and industrial development in the 19th century Imperial Russia as a result of the abolition of serfdom. We construct a novel province-level panel dataset of development outcomes and conduct a...

How far can the media undermine democratic institutions, and how persuasive can media be in ensuring public support for a dictator’s policies? We study this question in the context of Germany between 1929 and 1939. Using quasi-random geographical variation in radio availability, we show that...

We use spatial regression discontinuity analysis to test whether the historical partition of Poland among three empires—Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Prussia—has a persistent effect on political outcomes in contemporary Poland and to examine the channels of this influence. We find that the...

Which factors stand in the way of cooperation between countries formerly at war? We examine the role of nationalistic content of a media outlet reaching citizens of a neighboring country. We consider radio signals travelling across borders in the region that witnessed one of Europe’s deadliest...

Laws that work well in a rule-of-law country may produce unexpected outcomes in a corrupt environment. We argue that the legal system in Russia is faulted by the capture of regional divisions of arbitrage courts. We analyse the consequences of this for the efficiency of Russian bankruptcy law....

How do media affect voting behavior? What difference can an independent media outlet make in a country with state-controlled media? Our paper addresses these questions by comparing electoral outcomes and votes reported by survey respondents during the 1999 parliamentary elections in Russia for...

Governments that levy predatory regulation and provide few weak legal institutions draw businesses into the unofficial economy and compel them to hire private protection organizations. Based on a survey of shopkeepers in three cities in Russia, we find that retail shops face very high levels of...

Studies of the determinants of entrepreneurship have emphasized three distinct perspectives: market institutions, social networks and personal characteristics. Using data from a pilot survey with over 2,000 interviews in 7 cities across Russia, we find evidence for a particularly strong effect...