In the process of implementing market reforms, many post-socialist countries have struggled to preserve economic and political integration. Using a statistical model of commodity trade, we quantify the evolution of economic integration observed among regions within Russia during 1995-1999, and...

Working with 110 pairs of time series of state and market commodity prices in Russia, we search for signs of transition in Russia from a command to a market economy. Beginning with inter-city comparisons of state and market prices, we find that differences in the levels of these prices have...

In pursuit of its transition from a command to a market economy, post-Soviet Russia has witnessed enormous regional differences in economic growth rates. Moreover, the economic reforms implemented under this transition, while initiated at the federal level, have also differed markedly across...

A growing body of national-level survey evidence indicates that small-scale entrepreneurial activity has been an important engine of growth in post-socialist economies. Here we use a rich regional data set to obtain a statistical characterization of the relationship between entrepreneurial...

This thesis deals with macroeconomic dynamics. In chapter 1, I study a one-sector growth model withendogenous discount rate of the sort proposed by citet{1}. I extendthe model into a heterogeneous agents model with respect to initialwealth, and investigate whether the wealthdistribution may...

This dissertation analyzes how the degree of financial integration and the exchange rate regime of a country affect its economic growth. The discussion is focused on developing countries, with special emphasis on Latin America, and it contributes to the recent economic growth and development...

I study selected fiscal policy issues both in the short-run and long-run using empirical methods. In Chapter 2, I investigate the effects of increases in U.S. government expenditures on the private sector in a real business cycle framework using maximum likelihood. I distinguish between the...

The first chapter of my thesis (co-authored with David N. DeJong, Jean-Francois Richard and Roman Liesenfeld) develops a numerical procedure that facilitates efficient likelihood evaluation and filtering in applications involving non-linear and non-Gaussian state-space models. These tasks...

A number of recent papers using a linear specification have indicated that private property institutions are a fundamental determinant of growth. In my first paper, I use a semi-nonparametric partially linear model to provide evidence against a linear specification and to support nonlinearities...

This dissertation consists of three empirical chapters. The first chapter examines the extent to which real-world agents are rational in making quantitative expectations, an issue over which there is much debate. In this chapter dynamic models for new plant-level survey data are estimated in...