We investigate how the regional institutional environment—in particular, the political environment—affects Russian new firm entry across regions, industries, firm size classes, and time. We find that entry rates in Russia are explained by natural entry rates and the institutional environment. Industries that are characterized by low entry barriers in developed market economies are found to have lower entry rates in regions subject to greater political fluidity, as in the case of gubernatorial change. We also find that higher levels of political fluidity and democracy increase relative entry rates for small-sized firms but reduce them for medium-sized or large ones.

This article explores the impact of EU membership on foreign direct investment (FDI). It analyses empirically how the effects of such deep integration differ from other forms and investigates what drives these effects. Using a structural gravity framework on annual bilateral FDI data for almost every country in the world from 1985 to 2018, we find EU membership leads to about 60 per cent higher FDI investment into the host economy from outside the EU, and around 50 per cent higher intra‐EU FDI. Moreover, we find that the effect of EU membership on FDI is larger than from membership of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the European Free Trade Association and the Southern Common Market, and that the single market is the cornerstone of this differential impact.

Citizens' tax compliance should not only respond to the quality of formal institutions, but might also be culturally driven. We contribute to this literature by investigating whether tax morale, an individual's intrinsic non-pecuniary motivation to comply with taxes, is associated with the cultural values (following Hofstede's typology) held by this individual. The analysis exploits four waves of the European Values Survey (1981–2010) across 48 countries. The cultural dimensions are constructed through a polychoric principal component analysis on a set of relevant survey items consistent with Hofstede's definitions. Ordered logit estimations suggest that although values of individualism and femininity are associated with higher individual's tax morale, power distance and uncertainty avoidance are associated with lower tax morale. These results remain consistent as we increase the level of granularity of our investigation through within-region analyses and, subsequently, within-cohort analyses. We argue that these results inevitably enrich the emerging debate about cultural values and citizens' compliance with formal institutions. They also indicate that societal culture as well as individual values should be considered when designing policies aiming to improve tax compliance.

Purpose: This paper aims to conduct a systematic meta-analysis on emerging economies to summarize these effects and throw light on the strength and heterogeneity of these conditionalities.Design/methodology/approach: This paper proposes a new methodological framework that allows country- and firm-level effects to be combined. The authors hand collected information from 175 studies and around 1,100 estimates in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa from 1940 to 2008.Findings: The two main findings indicate that “macro” effects are much larger than enterprise-level ones, by a factor of at least six and the benefits from foreign direct investment (FDI) into emerging economies are substantially less “conditional” than commonly thought.Originality/value: The empirical literature has not reached a conclusion as to whether FDI yields spillovers when the host economies are emerging. Instead, the results are often viewed as conditional. For macro studies, this means that the existence and scale of spillover effects are contingent on the levels of institutional, financial or human capital development attained by the host economies. For enterprise-level studies, conditionality relates to the type of inter-firm linkages, namely, forwards, backwards or horizontal.