The aim of the paper is to explicitly disentangle the role of political and cultural boundaries as factors of fragmentation of economies within large countries. On the one hand, local protectionism plays a substantial role in many federations and decentralized states. On the other hand, if the...

Using a brand new comprehensive dataset, provided by the Eurasian Development Bank, the paper elaborates on the state of regional integration in Central Asia. We find that although the economic links between the Central Asian countries are more pronounced than between that of the CIS in several...

Anti-Western conspiracies are frequently used by Governments to strengthen their power. We investigate the impact of conspiracy thinking on expectations of collusion among individuals in Russia and China. For this purpose, we conduct a novel laboratory experiment to measure expectations of...

We contribute to the rich literature on the role of political boundaries for international and inter-regional transactions by introducing a new methodology and testing it on an important case, China. This paper is based on new identification approach, which combines the use of sub-regional data...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...

In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...