David M. Woodruff

Department of Government
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE

p. +44 (0) 20 7955 7282
f. +44 (0) 20 7955 6352
e.

C.V.

Publications

Book Articles Chapters in Books Short Pieces Review Essays

Book:

1999 Money Unmade: Barter and the Fate of Russian Capitalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 228 pp. Table of Contents (pdf)- Preface (pdf)- Selections From Reviews - Review by The Economist - Paperback at Amazon.com - Hardcover at Amazon.com

Articles:

2006. "Understanding Rules and Institutions: Possibilities and Limits of Game Theory," Qualitative Methods. 4 (1): 13-17. (pdf, 4,090k, pp.5)

ABSTRACT: Examines whether the modelling of institutions as equilibrium strategies in a repeated game is effective, arguing that it can be, but only in those circumstances in which local context is unimportant. Discusses the analytic dangers that arise when susceptibility of institutions to compact game-theoretic modelling is assumed when incentives are in fact contextual.

2006. "Nestabil'nost' chastnoi sobstvennosti v Rossii: ekonomicheskie i politicheskie prichiny." [The Instability of Private Property in Russia: Economic and Political Causes.] Russkie Chteniia. Vypusk 1. Moskva: "Gruppa Ekspert," 2006: 206-219. (pdf, 141k, pp. 8).

ABSTRACT: Argues that the instability of property rights in Russia is not a result of bad laws or a corrupt legal system, but rather of powerful contextual incentives encouraging efforts to seize property. Such incentives arose initially from the design of privatization, and later from radical volatility in the price environment. Solutions to the problem must take these incentives into account; sloganeering about the "rule of law" does more to obscure than help in this regard.

2005. "Commerce and Demolition in Tsarist and Soviet Russia: Lessons for Theories of Trade Politics and the Philosophy of Social Science," Review of International Political Economy 12 (2):199-225. (pdf, 1,039k, pp. 27)

ABSTRACT: Leaders of commodity-exporting states will sometimes push exports even when world prices are declining, if export receipts allow access to international capital markets. This article demonstrates that such state-mediated ties between commodity and capital markets shaped the politics of foreign trade in tsarist, and then Soviet, Russia. It also refutes an alternate, group-centered explanation of the same historical cases proposed in Rogowski’s Commerce and Coalitions, pointing out serious empirical errors and oversights. These empirical problems have methodological implications. Searching for universal “laws,” rather than sometimes relevant “mechanisms,” limits the consideration of counterhypotheses to those that apply to a whole universe of cases, rather than a subset of them. Because such counterhypotheses serve to determine which data are relevant, their exclusion weakens the empirical tests to which proposed laws are subjected. Thus, the ambition for generality may cause scholars to become inadvertently too generous to the theories they seek to test.

2005 "Boom, Gloom, Doom: Balance Sheets, Monetary Fragmentation, and Financial Crisis in Argentina and Russia," Politics & Society 33 (4): 3-47. Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for the best paper presented at the 2003 Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association (joint winner). (pdf, 837k, pp. 44)

ABSTRACT: In the 1990s, Russia and Argentina both tied their currencies to the dollar to combat inflation. They later devalued under pressure, but only after an extremely costly delay, and only after an explosive spread of monetary surrogates substituting for official currency. This article explains these puzzling developments using an institutional-sociological approach to money, which relates exchange-rate preferences to financial context ("balance sheets") rather than sectoral position, as is common. It proposes a "lock-in" mechanism explaining delayed devaluation in both cases, as well as Argentina 's greater delay, and explores the linkages between exchange-rate policy and the origins of monetary surrogates.

2004 "Property Rights in Context: Privatization’s Legacy for Corporate Legality in Poland and Russia," Studies in Comparative International Development 38 (4): 82-108. (pdf, 126k, pp. 28)

ABSTRACT: In the first decade after the collapse of Communism, Russia became notorious for conflicts around corporate property and corporate governance. In Poland, such conflicts were far less frequent. This distinction, I argue, reflects the form of privatization in each country. In Poland, negotiation among potential shareholders and current enterprise stakeholders preceded privatization, whereas in Russia privatization procedures pitted these same groups against one another. The legacy of privatization in Russia expressed itself in long-running legal conflicts over the security of property rights. These developments highlight the importance of situational incentives to challenge or respect property rights, undermining various new-institutionalist arguments that link security of property rights primarily to the commitment and capacity of state bodies to enforce them, to the normative legitimacy of the law, or to coordination equilibria in a game-theoretic framework. The argument also enables a clarification of the political trajectory now leading to stronger corporate property rights in Russia.

2000 "Rules for Followers: Institutional Theory and the New Politics of Economic Backwardness in Russia," Politics & Society 28 (4): 437-482. (pdf, 188k, pp. 46)

ABSTRACT: Investigates contemporary Russia’s real, but shallow success in implementing two borrowed capitalist institutions—a monetary system and the joint-stock company. Even though money and shares of stock in Russia are exchanged in voluntary transactions, they fail to play the legal roles ordinarily expected of them, resulting in weak corporate governance and nonmonetary (barter) exchange. Via a criticism of game-theoretic approaches to institutions in the New Institutional Economics, argues that the roots of this shallow marketization lie in the distinct social foundations of the transactional and legal roles of money and corporate stock. Arguments drawn from sociological institutionalism then illuminate why Russia displays this limited isomorphism to authoritative international models of market institutions. The article concludes by discussing implications for a third body of institutional theory, historical institutionalism, and the possible broader relevance of the pattern of shallow marketization in contemporary relatively backward countries.

1999 "It's Value that's Virtual: Bartles, Rubles, and the Place of Gazprom in the Russian Economy," Post-Soviet Affairs 15 (2): 130-148. (pdf, 4,253k, pp. 20)

ABSTRACT: Criticizes the "virtual economy" model pioneered by Clifford Gaddy and Barry Ickes, demonstrating that their key assumption of value subtraction is algebraically unnecessary to their conclusions. Argues that Gaddy and Ickes overstate the extent to which Gazprom meaningfully subsidizes domestic consumers, suggesting that the company instead has pursued a policy of "reverse dumping," in which it charges domestic consumers less than foreign ones as a form of revenue-maximizing price discrimination. However, price rigidities that complicate this policy mean that domestic-market sales regularly take place in nonmonetary form.

1998 "Why Market Liberalism and the Ruble's Value are Sinking Together," East European Constitutional Review 7 (4): 73-76. (pdf, 957k, pp. 4)

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Chapters in Books:

2009. “The Politburo on Gold, Money, and the International Economy, 1925-1926,” in The Lost Politburo Transcripts, Paul R. Gregory and Norman Naimark, eds. New Haven: Yale University Press.

ABSTRACT: Based on newly available Politburo transcripts, this essay analyzes Bolshevik policy on inflation, the gold standard, and international trade in 1925-1926. During this period, an ambitious push for industrial expansion required imports, while rising procurement prices for grain complicated exports. The result was a severe shortage of gold, which became the focal issue of the Politburo's debates on economic policymaking. Although the gold crisis was addressed through macroeconomic restriction, in the advocacy of which several Politburo members displayed sophisticated economic reasoning, it also gave rise to a number of microeconomic restrictions that foreshadow the policies that ended NEP later in the decade. Thus, the Politburo debates underscore the extreme fragility of the NEP model as early as 1925-1926.

2002 "Monnaie, Troc et Place de Gazprom dans l'Économie Russe," in La Transition Monétaire Russe: Avatars de la Monnaie, Crises de la Finance (1990-2000), Sophie Brana, Mathilde Mesnard and Yves Zlotowski, eds. Paris: Editions l'Harmattan, 83-101. Translation of "It's Value that's Virtual," 1999 (see "Articles")

1999 "Barter of the Bankrupt: The Politics of Demonetization in Russia's Federal State," in Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World, Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 83-124

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Short Pieces

2007 "The Expansion of State Ownership in Russia: Cause for Concern?" Development & Transition no. 7, July, 11-13.

2003 Khodorkovsky's Gamble: From Business to Politics in the YUKOS Conflict, PONARS Policy Memo No. 308, November.

2002 The End of 'Primitive Capitalist Accumulation'? The New Bankruptcy Law and the Political Assertiveness of Russian Big Business, PONARS Policy Memo No. 274, November.

2001 Pension Reform in Russia: From the Politics of Implementation to the Politics of Lawmaking?, PONARS Policy Memo No. 234, December.

2000 Too Much of a Good Thing? High Oil Prices and Russian Monetary Policy, PONARS Policy Memo No. 175, November.

1999 Dilemmas and Tradeoffs in Russian Exchange Rate Policy, PONARS Policy Memo No. 90, October.

1998 The Russian Barter Debate: Implications for Western Policy, PONARS Policy Memo No. 38, November.

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Review Essays

2009 "The Economist's Burden," New Left Review (55): 143-152. Reviews Anders Åslund, How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia and Central Asia, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge 2007.

2008 Review of Karen S. Cook, Russell Hardin, and Margaret Levi, Cooperation Without Trust and Michael Taylor, Rationality and the Ideology of Disconnection for Perspectives on Politics.

2003 Review of Randall Stone's Lending Credibility for Slavic Review 62 (3): 584-585. (pdf, 443k, pp. 2)

2001 Review of Mancur Olson's Power and Prosperity for East European Constitutional Review 10 (1): 97-103.

2001 Review of Timothy Frye's Brokers and Bureaucrats: Building Market Institutions in Russia for Studies in Comparative International Development 35 (4): 117-119. (pdf. 644k, pp. 3)

1997 "Law and the Postsocialist Market," East European Constitutional Review 6 (4): 99-103. Reviews Sachs and Pistor, eds., The Rule of Law and Economic Reform in Russia (Westview, 1997) and Weimer, ed., The Political Economy of Property Rights: Institutional Change and Credibility in the Reform of Centrally Planned Economies (Cambridge, 1997).

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