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The paper considers the influence of war experience on the norms and values of the Great Patriotic War veterans and studies the intergenerational transmission of the values created by the war to the veterans' descendants. The study conjectures that the war developed higher civic culture and fostered ability to collective action, altruism, and self-reliance. The war enlarged the "space of freedom" for its partici- pants, providing the new experiences of autonomy and grassroots self-organization and promoting the feelings of dignity and common belonging to the destiny of one's native land. The paper shows that similar norms and values are, ceteris paribus, more common among the veterans' (grand)children than among the other Russians.

The New Institutional Economics has established itself as widely accepted extension to the standard neoclassical paradigm. Here, institutions are defined as commonly known rules that structure recurring interaction situations and the corresponding sanctioning mechanism. For-mal institutions describe rules with a sanction mechanism that is organized by the state. In-formal institutions describe rules with a sanction mechanism that is not organized by the state but by other societal members. Most studies providing empirical evidence that institutions matterʺ focus solely on formal institutions. This is in stark contrast to the theoretical acknowledgement that human decisions are shaped by both formal and informal institutions. This dissertation brings together five contributions in the empirical analysis of informal institutions. The first contribution provides a conceptual framework for the measurement of informal institutions. The second and third contribution analyze the impact of informal institutions on economic outcomes. The fourth contribution is concerned with the trade-off between formal and informal contract enforcement, while the fifth contribution is concerned with the effect of individual level religiosity on acceptance of corruption.