Are Russian firms being allowed to clean the slate with respect to the Soviet legacy of obsolete capital stock? If estimates of capital productivity and firm-level efficiency in Soviet industry are correct, enterprise managers in Russia's emerging market economy will lobby for high depreciation...

This paper examines within-industry variation in labor productivity at the beginning of Russia's transition process in 1992, as well as regional variation in the percentage of firms that exhibit below industry average labor productivity. The main hypothesis is that industries and regions where a...

This paper examines the nature and scope of enterprise restructuring in Russia using two sources of firm-level data. The first involves a panel of over 2,000 civilian manufacturing firms in Moscow, Tver, Volgograd, Rostov, and Novosibirsk. The second involves data collected from a series of...

This case study of enterprise restructuring utilizes data collected from thirty-two former state-owned firms in Taganrog, Russia, in the summer and fall of 1999. These data are used to construct three composite measures of enterprise restructuring. When defined broadly to include several...

This paper develops a model to investigate the welfare implications of barter in Russia and other transition economies during the 1990s. We argue that barter is a welfare-improving phenomenon that acts as a defense mechanism against monetary instability. When firms react to tighter credit...

This paper explores the determinants of job search behavior, search intensity and choices of search methods of the unemployed workers in transitional Russia. We use pooled data from rounds 5-9 of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) to estimate the effects of socio-economic factors...

How do economic policies and institutions affect job reallocation processes and their consequences for productivity growth? This paper studies the extreme case of economic system change and alternative transitional policies in the former Soviet Republics of Russia and Ukraine. Exploiting annual...

Both Western and Soviet estimates of GNP growth in the USSR indicate that GNP per capita grew in every decade – sometimes rapidly – from 1928 to 1985. While this measure suggests that the standard of living improved in the USSR throughout this period, it is unclear whether this economic...

What motivates Russians to work? This paper utilizes survey data collected in May/June 2000 from 1200 employees in three regions of Russia to analyze the gender and generational differences in factors influencing motivation to work. Five main results emerge. First, Russians are not significantly...

This paper investigates the relationship between locus of control and performance among Russian employees, using survey data collected at 28 workplaces in 2002 in Taganrog and at 47 workplaces in 2003 in Ekaterinburg. We develop a measure that allows us to categorize the Russian employees...