Recent issue of Applied Economics Letters includes a research article by Ruslan Kuchakov и Dmitriy Skougarevskiy on the effects of wage subsidied by Russian central government on employment and profit margins.

In a new policy memo titled “Legal Norms on Forced Breach of Contract (Force Majeure): a study of enforcement by State Commercial Courts” IRL researchers study how Russian commercial courts tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. We found 4161 cases considering this issue of non-performance due to force majeure from the universe of all rulings in March 2020 — October 2021. We then focused our analysis on cases related to the impossibility of fulfilling obligations under loan and credit agreements in disputes with banks, as well as in disputes of organizations affected by the pandemic.

We present a policy memo “Same Point of Law”: Citations of [Precedent] Cases in Commercial Courts". We examined 6.9 million texts of rulings of state commercial (“arbitrazh”) courts to identify references to judicial law-making: legal positions set forth by courts in similar cases. Some findings from this study:

• there is a notable number of decisions in which such references are used, there are cases that are cited thousands of times. We call such cases the “precedent cases”.
• there exist court decisions that refer to a large number of decisions in other cases in support of the stated legal position.

We also present the Precedent Atlas — an interactive map of cases, available at http://precedent.enforce.spb.ru. Read the full text (in Russian): full text.

In 2019 Russia started a new phase of regulatory reform – „regulation guillotine.“ Our report, „The intermediate results of regulatory reform in Russia during 2016-2019“ summarizes the intermediate results of reform based on data from 11 major federal agencies. Full text (in Russian)