The virtual economy argument for Russia suggests that barter allows the parties to pretend that the manufacturing sector is producing value added by enabling this sector to sell its output at a higher price than its market value. We confront this prediction with the actual pricing behavior of...

The compensation of executive board members in Germany has become a highly controversial topic since Vodafone's hostile takeover of Mannesmann in 2000 and it is again in the spotlight since the outbreak of the financial crisis of 2009. Based on unique panel data evidence of the 500 largest firms...

What needs to be done to address the phenomenon that money has vanished as a medium of exchange from the economies of the former Soviet Union? Based on the finding that barter is a response to imperfect capital and input markets, the paper argues why expansionary monetary policy in barter...

This paper builds a model that provides a unified explanation for the onset of the financial crisis in 1998 and the striking economic recovery in Russia afterwards. We argue that before the crisis, the banking sector in Russia was stuck in a banking development trap due to firms incentives to...

This paper introduces an internal capital market into a two-factor model of multi-segment frms that features managers' empire building and informational frictionswithin the organization. Our novel theory shows that international trade imposesdiscipline on divisional managers and improves capital...