Three hypotheses about the nature of federal tax arrears in Russia in the second half of the 1990s are tested empirically. Tax arrears can be a result of: 1) liquidity problems in firms, 2) redistributive subsidies of the federal government, or 3) regional political resistance to federal tax...

Laws that work well in a country with the rule of law may produce unexpected outcomes in a corrupt environment. We argue that the Russian legal system is impaired by the capture of regional divisions of arbitrage courts, and analyze the consequences of this capture. Using a theoretical model and...