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Ruben Enikolopov
I am a Nordea Assistant Professor of Finance at the New Economic School in Moscow. My research interests include political economy, development and corporate finance. Publications “Decentralization and Political Institutions” (with Ekaterina Zhuravskaya) Journal of Public Economics, December 2007, 91: 2261-2290. Does fiscal decentralization lead to more efficient governance, better public goods, and higher economic growth? This paper tests Riker's theory that the results of fiscal decentralization depend on the level of countries' political centralization. We analyze cross-section and panel data from up to 75 developing and transition countries for 25 years. Two of Riker's predictions about the role of political institutions in disciplining fiscally-autonomous local politicians are confirmed by the data. 1) Strength of national political parties significantly improves outcomes of fiscal decentralization such as economic growth, quality of government, and public goods provision. 2) In contrast, administrative subordination (i.e., appointing local politicians rather than electing them) does not improve the results of fiscal decentralization.
“Federalism and Political Centralization” (with Ekaterina Zhuravskaya), in Political Institutions and Development: Failed Expectations and Renewed Hopes, Natalia Dinello and Vladimir Popov (eds.), Edward Elgar: Cheltenham, UK (2007)
Working Papers “Media and Political Persuasion: Evidence from Russia” (with Maria Petrova and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya), March 2009 Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review How do media affect voting behavior? What difference an independent media outlet can make in a country with state-controlled media? We address these questions using exogenous variation in the availability of the signal of NTV, the only independent from the government national TV channel in during the 1999 parliamentary elections. We look at electoral outcomes both at aggregate and individual level. We find that the presence of an independent source of political news on TV decreased the vote for the main pro-government party by 2.5 percentage points and increased the combined vote for major opposition parties by 2.1 percentage points. Placebo regressions for 1995 and 2003 elections suggest that the effects are not driven by unobserved heterogeneity between subregions with and without NTV coverage. In individual level data, we find significant effect of watching NTV on voters’ choice even controlling for respondents’ voting intentions just a month before the elections. We also find that the effect of NTV is smaller for people who use newspapers as an alternatives sources of political information and people with high level of political knowledge.
“Politicians, Bureaucrats and Targeted Redistribution: The Role of Career Concerns", July 2009 Previous title "Politicians, Bureaucrats and Patronage” Stronger career concerns induce appointed bureaucrats to adopt different policies as compared with elected politicians. In particular, they are less likely to use targeted redistribution to achieve personal political goals. I use example of patronage jobs in local governments in the U.S. to provide empirical support for this claim. I show that the number of full-time public employees is significantly higher in local governments with elected chief executives and that this difference increases during the election years. I find that the number of full-time public employees increases with the age of appointed chief executive, but there is no such relationship in the case of elected chief executives. This result is consistent with the notion that career careers are especially strong for young bureaucrats, which makes them least likely to be engaged in targeted redistribution. None of the results is significant for the number of part-time employees, since hiring part-time employees provides very few political benefits as compared with full-time employees. “Are Bureaucrats Really Paid Like Bureaucrats?”, March 2008 (available upon request) Traditionally, bureaucrats are viewed as a stereotypical example of employees with flat pay schedules and low-powered incentive schemes. This paper challenges this view by providing evidence that wages of a particular group of senior bureaucrats - city managers - are tightly connected to their performance. I show that salaries of city managers are strongly linked to city growth. Additional tests indicate that these results reflect reward for performance, rather than rent extraction. This evidence demonstrates that at least for some bureaucrats there is a strong association between performance and compensation. Competition among local governments is likely to be the main force that sustains high-powered incentives for city managers.
Work in Progress “Effect of Local Political Institutions: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Afghanistan” (with Andrew Beath and Fotini Christia) “Entrepreneurial Biases” (with Paul Gompers) "Retrospective Choice of Political Institutions" "Politics, instability, and international investment flows" (with Art Durnev and Maria Petrova) "Corporate Governance, Taxability, and Politics" (with Art Durnev and Maria Petrova)
Contacts Address: Office 922, New Economic School Nakhimovsky pr. 47 Moscow 117418 Russia Email: renikolopov@nes.ru
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