Previous attempts at estimating the economic model of crime with aggregate data relied heavily on crosssection econometric techniques, and therefore do not control for unobserved heterogeneity. This is even true of studies which estimated simultaneous equations models. Using a new panel dataset of North Carolina counties, we exploit both single and simultaneous equations panel data estimators to address two sources of endogeneity: unobserved heterogeneity and conventional simultaneity. Our results suggest that both labor market and criminal justice strategies are important in deterring crime, but that the effectiveness of law enforcement incentives has been greatly overstated.
Purpose
Using various macro-level measures of economic and political performance Shleifer and Treisman (2005) and Treisman (2014) call Russia a “normal country” implying that Russia’s economic and political development is not deviating from the other middle-income or transition countries significantly. The purpose of this paper is to challenge this proposition and investigate whether Russia is a normal country in terms of entrepreneurship by comparing Russia with other post-socialist and similarly developed countries.
Design/methodology/approach
Many studies have examined Russia’s institutional setup to explain its deficiencies in entrepreneurial activity. However, there is a lack of comprehensive research taking into account both the individual and institutional dimensions of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. The authors use the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) methodology to analyze Russia’s quality-related individual as well as institutional features from a system perspective in a single model.
Findings
Russia’s performance has been poor relative to the post-socialist countries and to most of the former republics of the Soviet Union. Russia’s entrepreneurial profile is different from other transition and similarly developed non-transition countries, as well. Russia’s scores are less than the scores of other post-socialist countries in six out of the nine pillars of entrepreneurial attitudes and abilities. In sum, conditions supporting entrepreneurship in Russia lag seriously behind other post-socialist countries. Moreover, Russia’s individual scores are even lower than the institutional ones. Hence, improving the hostile environment alone would not be sufficient for entrepreneurship development.
Originality/value
Although, there have been numerous studies analyzing Russia’s macroeconomic conditions, institutional development, and entrepreneurship, there is lack of comprehensive studies. Besides common macro-level measures, the authors use a unique, GEI data set that combines institutional factors relating to entrepreneurship or new business creation with measures of individual capabilities, motivations, and attitudes about entrepreneurship. The single-model framework reveals that individual factors are even greater obstacles to entrepreneurship development in Russia than the institutional factors that most studies focus on.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.