Aid donors and recipients have long been concerned that aid inflows may lead to an appreciation of the real exchange rate and an associated loss of competitiveness. This paper provides new evidence of the dynamic effects of aid on the real exchange rate, using an identification strategy that...

Laws that work well in developed market economies may produce unexpected outcomes in a corrupt environment. Once a legal institution is formally in place, it might be subverted by those who control its day-to-day operations. This paper focuses on the institution of bankruptcy to provide a case...

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...

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...

In textbook theory, demand curves for stocks are kept flat by riskless arbitrage between perfect substitutes. In reality, however, individual stocks do not have perfect substitutes. The risk inherent in arbitrage between imperfect substitutes may deter risk-averse arbitrageurs from flattening...

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...

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...