Who Influences Your Outcomes?
The Effect of Culture and Ethnic Origin, Neighborhood and Peers on Personal Income: A Spatial Econometric Analysis of New York City
(Job Market Paper) download
Being a “social animal”, each person is inherently embedded into a complex structure of social relations. He has role models to aspire to, conformity rules to follow, and expectations to meet. This paper aims to find what the different social influences each person experiences in life are. Specifically, I consider how a person’s ethnic community, age reference group, occupational and industry group peers, and residential area neighbors affect his total income. I introduce a novel model of multiple social networks and discuss various identification implications. I apply the model empirically to New York City, which naturally is a very favorable environment to test for multiple social effects. The study uses generous person-level American Community Survey data that covers rich geographic, ethnic, demographic, and employment characteristics. The sample used is made of five pooled cross-sections, resulting in about 270,000 observations. I analyze a model with spatial lags in dependent variable (SAR), a model with spatial lags in disturbance term (SEM), and a model with spatial lags in both dependent variable and error (SAC). I find highly significant effects for various specifications and elaborate on many aspects of the multiple social effects model.
The Effect of Bribes on Firms’ Productivity: Evidence from 14 Post-Soviet States
(under review in Review of Economic Development) download
Do bribes help businesses? The crucial question of the impact of corruption on economic outcomes research is whether the informal payments, in fact, facilitate business processes and increase firms’ productivity or, in contrast, amplify the transaction burden and reduce firms’ efficiency. This paper examines various aspects of the relationship between bribery and firms’ performance. I use a firm-level unbalanced panel dataset provided by the World Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which covers 14 countries of the former Soviet Union. The paper finds that the value of informal payment made by a firm has a negative effect on its productivity, while the higher frequency of payments has a positive effect on productivity. I provide evidence that weaknesses in the investment climate may change the impact of bribes on the firms’ performance either diminishing or enhancing it. I show that the corruption burden is the highest for innovative firms, firms suffering from utilities outages, firms that do not have sufficient financial funds, and firms facing high market competition.
Industries’ Self-regulation de jure and de facto: The Case of Russia
(with Polina Krychkova) Text in Russian is available upon request.
Funded by Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Program of Fundamental Studies, Moscow, 2011.
The development of self-regulation as a way to decrease the unnecessary administrative burdens for economic actors has been mentioned in the public policy documents of the Russian government since 2001. The special law “On Self-Regulation Bodies” was adopted in 2005. The aim of the paper is to analyze whether the self-regulation model with clearly defined legal status of self-regulation bodies introduced in Russia has actual advantages from the point of view of private actors and the public interest. We use the results from unique survey of 315 business-associations and the official data on the self-regulation bodies performance in particular industries. The main finding of the paper is that there is a substantial gap between self-regulation de jure and self-regulation de facto in Russia. The existing legal framework prevents the development of effective voluntary self-regulation. Furthermore, the lack of the implied model of the obligatory self-regulation leads to substantial increase in costs of regulation and does nothing for the protection of the third parties (consumers), in spite of the formally strong requirements for schemes of compensating third parties for damages. We suggest some policy recommendations for improved development of self-regulation in Russia.