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This article investigates the role of boards in founder-managed firms with concentrated ownership in emerging markets. The literature frequently suggests that in this type of companies, boards have little influence on the corporate decision making. The article conducts a case study of AFK Sistema—a large Russian founder-managed firm with concentrated ownership. We observe that, contrary to the expectations, in this company, the founder provided real authority to the board, at the same time focusing on recruiting independent (mainly foreign) members. Based on this case, we argue that selectively empowering boards in this type of ownership setting could be beneficial for the firm: Selective empowerment is a source of intrinsic motivationfor the independent board members, making them proactively search for new projects and assist in their implementation on behalf of the firm. As a result, the company can overcome a number of important barriers in its development.

Corruption has been a constant factor in Russia’s political economy. From one era to another, the multifarious forms of corruption continue to pervade Russian politics despite sincere and insincere efforts to fight it. The election of Vladimir Putin as president in 2000 brought a new effort at consolidating and organizing authority in the country. However, far from eliminating corruption, politics of the Putin era have merely changed the form of corruption, integrating corruption into the “power vertical” through which Putin governs.

In recent years, corruption has played an ever larger role in the regime’s stability. It serves as a force to co-opt and control the political elite and to replace formal institutions with something more flexible and more amenable to the needs of a consolidated authoritarian regime. Only deep changes, such as higher levels of political competition, have a chance of reducing corruption in the long run. The approaching fourth term of President Putin will continue to increase the role of informal institutions in Russian politics, in which corruption plays an increasingly large role in the Kremlin’s management of the political process.

Public procurement procedures prescribed by legislation not only enhance transparency and competition but also entail certain transaction costs for both customers and suppliers. These costs are important to the efficiency of the procurement system. However, very few previous studies have focused on estimating procurement costs. This paper proposes a methodology for public procurement cost evaluation. We show how procurement costs can be calculated using a formalized survey of public customers. This methodology was tested with a representative group of public customers operating in one region of the Russian Federation. We formulate the policy implications of our study as they relate to the improvement of public procurement regulations and argue that this methodological approach can be applied in other developing and transitioning economies.

This paper argues that understanding the business environment in Russia requires putting the government front and center. In response to economic crisis and falling oil prices, the Russian government has gone on the offensive. Through the use of targeted subsidies, protectionist policies, and procedural reforms, it has worked to stem economic collapse and prop up economic production. Some of these efforts have had a tangible impact on the way business is conducted in Russia, though the list of obstacles private firms still must maneuver is sizable.

However, the most important development over the last decade has been the state’s direct takeover of valuable economic assets and the creation of massive state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This (re)nationalization jeopardizes the economic viability of many private firms by concentrating wealth and opportunities in a small group of well-connected SOEs. Private companies have adapted to this reality by devising a set of political strategies to ensure favorable treatment from the government. From mobilizing their workers during elections to running their directors for political office, these companies understand that remaining on good terms with the government is key to survival. Urgent structural reforms are needed to unwind the government’s role in the economy. Without changes, political connections will remain paramount to generating profits in Russia.

From robocalls to vote buying to electoral intimidation scholars have identified many ways that politicians mobilize voters to the polls. We develop a simple argument about the conditions under which autocrats will use positive inducements such as vote buying and negative inducement such as employee coercion of workers.  Using survey experiments and crowd-sourced electoral violation reports from the 2011-12 election cycle in Russia, we find little evidence that vote buying was practiced on a large scale in this election. This finding is consistent with arguments about the decline of vote buying in middle-income countries. Voter intimidation, however, was relatively common, especially among employed voters and in Russia’s many single company towns where employers have much leverage over employees.  In these single company towns, the consequences of job loss are so grave that employer intimidation may often be sufficient to induce compliance even without direct monitoring of voter behavior. Outside of company towns where employers have less leverage, active forms of monitoring may supplement intimidation in order to encourage compliance. These results suggest that employers can be reliable vote brokers; that voter intimidation can persist in a middle-income country; and that, under some conditions intimidation may be employed without the need for active monitoring.

Historical institutionalism has demonstrated the value of close analysis of policymaking to explain institutional change. In particular, scholars have distinguished four different patterns of institutional change: drift, conversion, layering, and displacement. To date, most of this literature has been based on studies of developed democracies. This paper uses a case comparison of pension reform in the two postcommunist giants, Russia and China, to analyze the analogous processes of agenda-setting, bargaining, choice, and policy implementation in bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes. While policymaking in both countries takes place almost entirely within the state bureaucracy, in China, state political authority is much more decentralized than in Russia. I argue that this difference helps to account for the characteristic difference in the patterns of policy change that we observe in the two cases: periodic abrupt reversals in Russia vs. incrementalism and layering in China.

The comparative analysis presents the first comparative study of the government procurement of French and Russian petroleum products with an in-depth  review of foreign legal sources and national policy instruments. Based on the findings, this research led to the conclusion that public procurement of hydrocarbons is an extremely sensitive matter in the geopolitical, political and institutional sense. Despite some similarities in the general concept of French and Russian legislation in public procurement, the analysis revealed a substantial difference in the implementation of public procurement policies. Russia is characterized by a predominance of electronic auctions where the evaluation is based solely on the price whereas France uses a wide variety of different criteria to evaluate procurement offers.

Available evidence indicates that there is considerable variation among autocracies in the extent to which subnational officials are rewarded for economic growth. Why is economic performance used as a criterion for appointment in some autocracies but not in others? We argue that in more competitive—though still autocratic—regimes, the political imperatives of maintaining an electoral machine that can win semi-competitive elections leads regime leaders to abandon cadre policies that promote economic development. Using data on turnover among high-level economic bureaucrats in Russia’s 89 regions between 2001 and 2012, we find that performance-based appointments are more frequent in less competitive regions. These findings demonstrate one way that semi-competitive elections can actually undermine economic development under autocracy

This article considers Russian income inequality in relation to the trend toward rising inequality in the U.S. and in most parts of the world. Income and wealth inequality in Russia has been rising except in periods when the economy is in recession, and wealth inequality in Russia is now highest in the world. The analysis shows that inequality trends in Russia share some characteristics with other developed and developing economies, including technological change, increased integration in the global economy, and the capitalization of rent streams. Financialization and dependence on natural resource extraction contribute strongly to both cross-sectional and cross-regional inequality in Russia. The absence of institutions for aggregating broad competing social interests—whether corporatist or partisan—restricts the capacity of the political system to set agreed rules governing the distribution of the burdens and benefits of economic growth. As in other political systems, both democratic and authoritarian, high inequality undermines the state’s ability to provide public goods that would contribute both to inclusive economic growth and a growing middle class.

We empirically study how social capital influences individuals' preferences for redistribution to target groups using unique surveys of approximately 34,000 individuals across 68 Russian regions in 2007 and 2011. There is a positive relationship between social capital and support for government redistribution based on objective verifiable criteria. We interpret the results in terms of the perceived likelihood of cheating. Benefits to the ‘needy’ are at greater risk of being diverted to nondeserving claimants compared to benefits for which there are objective criteria, such as merit, being retired or disabled, or having many children. Our results show that when there is higher social capital in a region, there is also less tolerance for the possibility of cheating by recipients of government income transfers.

Which incentives have the strongest impact on the size of the informal economy? Is it about government’s pressure against entrepreneurs operating in this sector, or is it about the benefits of legality? The goal of this paper is to explicitly contrast the role of sticks (court repressiveness) and carrots (financial aid to small and medium-sized firms) as factors determining the size of the informal economy, using the case of the Russian taxi market. It uses a unique dataset of taxi licensing data from regional transport departments and indicators for taxi market demand and supply to estimate the extent of informal business. When controlling for market demand and supply, it finds a strong and robust positive effect of sanctions on the size of the official market, with higher repressiveness leading to a smaller informal economy. In contrast, the effect of carrots was insignificant. The results suggest that the effectiveness of carrot policies is compromised when entrepreneurs operate informally to avoid dealing with corrupt bureaucrats and have low trust in the government.

The paper examines the role of testosterone-driven aggressive behavior in politics of non-democratic regimes and, in particular, its influence on the extent of the repressiveness of these regimes. To measure testosterone exposure, we apply the facial width-to-height metric (fWHR) – a standard proxy widely used in the psychological literature - and look at a sample of Russian regional governors. We find a positive relationship between the fWHR metric and the level of repression in the region of the governor. Testosterone-related behavior is, however, more widespread among younger governors and among governors with shorter tenure in office. Thus, the paper contributes to the recent trend of integrating insights of behavioral economics into political economics research.