We document the beneficial impact of human capital transfer from banks to nonfinancial firms: firms hiring ex-bankers have higher asset and employment growth and easier access to bank loans. Using a unique employee-employer-matched data set from Russia and exogenous variation in ex-bankers’ supply due to bank-branch-network restructurings, we establish the causal interpretation of these patterns. We also show that ex-bankers’ human capital consists of bank-specific and banking industry expertise (with the latter being acquired through interbank connections). Firms recognize the value of ex-bankers, who receive significant salary bonuses when a new bank loan is issued to the firm (JEL G21, G32, J24). Received August 17, 2020; editorial decision January 5, 2022; by editor: Isil Erel. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.

We use mandatory Russian banks’ reports to the Central Bank to construct a novel measure of offshore-banking. Individual bank involvement in offshore operations is calculated as a fraction of total transactions with foreign countries that go through offshore financial centers. We find that offshore-active banks perform less financial intermediation and focus more on international wire transfers. We show a positive relation between banks’ offshore activities and tax evasion of companies doing business through these banks. Finally, we show that the Central Bank eventually responds to this behavior: offshore-active banks have higher likelihood of license revocation and criminal investigation against top-management.

Firms from developed countries carry a culture of transparency in business transactions that is opposite to the culture of hiding and insider dealing in developing and transition economies. We employ Russian administrative data on reported earnings and market values of cars to measure wage misreporting for individual employees of domestic firms in Moscow. We show that closer ties to multinationals lead to improved transparency of wage reporting in private Russian companies. Employees located closest to movers from multinationals in the job quality space experience the largest gains in transparency. We find a robust correlation between wage misreporting and accounting fraud.

Most household production studies ignore unobserved inputs. Without additional assumptions, however, estimated impacts of the observed inputs cannot provide informative estimates of marginal products because of contaminating variations in unobserved inputs. Not even the signs of marginal impacts can be ascertained. One can establish the direction of these biases and significantly reduce them by including detailed information about nonproductive (pure consumption) goods in the analysis. Estimates from prior demand studies can also help determine the direction of the bias. We describe the stringent assumptions one must invoke in the absence of such additional information to be able to relate estimated effects to the true marginal products.

Using a portfolio theory framework, we introduce the concept of “political beta” to model firm-level export diversification in response to global political risk. Our model predicts that firms are less responsive to changes in political relations with lower beta countries—those that contribute less to the firm’s total political risk. We document patterns consistent with our model using disaggregated Russian firm-by-destination-country data during 2001–2011: Trade is positively correlated with political relations, though the effect is far weaker for trading partners whose political relations with Russia are relatively uncorrelated with those of other partners in a firm’s export portfolio.