A history of resistance to privatization in Russia

We investigate the connection between privatization in post-communist Russia and a mass privatization reform in Imperial Russia, the 1906 Stolypin land reform. Specifically, we relate historical measures of conflicts associated with the Stolypin reform to contemporary views on whether the privatization of the 1990s should be revised. These historical measures could influence contemporary views in two ways: first, differences in privatization-related conflicts in the past could have directly altered attitudes towards privatization in the 1990s and, second, these differences could merely reflect pre-determined dissimilarities in preferences. We first show that historical measures of resistance to privatization are associated with views that favor state ownership. One standard deviation increase in the historical resistance to privatization explains a quarter of the negative sentiment toward private property today. We also find that negative experiences with the Stolypin reform are associated with views on the procedural unfairness of modern privatization reforms, suggesting that pre-determined preferences cannot fully explain the weight of history.     

A reference-dependent representation with subjective tastes

Experimental and empirical evidence documents instances where the presence of an inferior option in a menu increases the attractiveness of the better options from that menu and thus distorts the normative ranking across menus. We analyze the case when in addition to this so called context-effects bias there is also a concern for flexibility, in the spirit of the literature initiated by Kreps (1979) and Dekel et al. (2001). Since the context-effects bias and the desire for flexibility both increase the inclination of a decision maker to choose larger menus, our analysis allows the disentangling of the effect of the behavioral bias from the effect of the rational desire from flexibility. We find a weak condition on the set of ex post preferences under which the two effects are identifiable. We show that our representation is essentially unique. From a methodological viewpoint, our paper provides a novel technique of identifying probabilities on the state space of subjective uncertainty introduced by Dekel et al. (2001) when this state space is infinite. This method renders the infinite state space essentially finite with respect to a certain salient property.     

Do small shareholders count?

We hypothesize that age similarity among small shareholders acts as an implicit coordinating device for their actions and, thus, could represent an indirect source of corporate governance in firms with dispersed ownership. We test this hypothesis on a sample of Swedish firms during the 1995-2000 period. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that compared with shareholders of differing ages, same-age noncontrolling shareholders sell more aggressively following negative firm news; firms with more age-similar small shareholders are more profitable and command higher valuation; and an increase (decline) in a firm's small shareholder age similarity brings a significantly large increase (decline) in its stock price. The last effects are more pronounced in the absence of a controlling shareholder.