changes to tax and investment laws (c.f. Auerbach and Hassett 1991; Cummins, Hassett, and Hubbard 1996; Handley 2014). With respect to the latter, scholars have used political regime types and veto points (Kenyon and Naoi 2010, Frye 2010, Jensen 2003, Henisz and Zelner 2001), political polarization between parties (Frye 2010, Frye 2002), leadership change and elections (Nishide and Nomi 2009; Kim et al. 2012; Jens 2013; Julio and Yook 2013; Kelly, Lubos, and Pastor 2014), and political violence (Barro 1991, Brunetti et al. 1998) as proxies indicating changes in the incentive structure underpinning the state’s preferences. Most such work has found that policy uncertainty decreases investment at both the micro- and macro-levels.

Studies focused on measuring inconsistency in regulatory enforcement have tended to do so directly, by examining the number of anti-trust cases brought over time (Bittlingmayer 2001), the number of offices responsible for permitting (Feiock and Jeong 2002), history of passage and repeal of regulation (Fabrizio 2012), retroactive changes in investment regulation (Lyons and Mayo 2005), survey responses on the anticipated direction of policy (Barrodale 2010; Engau and Hoffmann 2009), and surveys of bureaucratic discretion (Beazer 2012). A more recent body of work has also begun to examine the differences between _de jure_ expectations on the time needed to receive various government services and the _de facto_ time needed (Hallward-Driemeier and Pritchett 2015), although this body of work has been more concerned with documenting this gap and is correlates rather than its effect on investment. Work on corruption, although rarely couched in terms of regulatory uncertainty, has instead tended to use survey based measures: focusing on both measures of “grand” corruption – high-level corruption assessed via expert surveys – and the actual experiences of individuals and firms assessed through direct survey questions. Although evidence for a direct effect of corruption on investment is mixed (c.f. Mauro 1995; Slinko et al. 2005; Treismann 2007), an emerging body of work suggests that the predictability of corruption is critical to investment decisions (Malesky and Samphantharak 2008; Wei 1997; World Bank 1997).

Finally, several empirical studies have also connected property rights protection directly to investment, albeit mostly through the use of macro-level data (c.f. Jensen 2006; Gehlbach and Keefer 2012). Qualitative studies have shed some light on how this mechanism works within the Russian context. The practice of predatory policing and use of inconsistent property rights protections by state officials to enrich themselves was first directly analyzed by Gerber and Mendelson (2008). Subsequent work has shed light on the legal framework of such predation, as well as the ways in which private threats by firms to other firms were replaced by state threats to property rights including seizing firms' assets, illegal corporate raiding, extortion, illicit fines, and unlawful arrests of businesspeople (Firestone 2010; Gans-Morse 2012). In contrast to the purely pecuniary motives cited by traditional work on state-led expropriation, however, evidence suggests that inconsistent property rights enforcement by Russian officials can also be tied to political incentives. Analyzing 312 cases of illegal corporate raiding between 1999 and 2010 collected from Russian mass-media, Rochlitz (2014) shows that electoral victories for the ruling party are positively correlated with hostile, violent takeovers in Russia’s regions. He argues that the federal center may tolerate a certain degree of predatory activities by regional elites, as long as these elites are able to deliver a sufficiently high level of electoral support for the center. Finally, Yakovlev et al. (2014) analyzed the logic of collective action in the Russian business community to resist predatory activity by law enforcement bodies.

# **III. RUSSIA’S INSTITUTIONAL CONTEXT**

Before turning to a discussion of this paper’s research design, hypotheses, and data, it is worth providing some background on Russia’s institutional setting in order to provide a better understanding of its potential consequences for regulatory uncertainty. This provides important contextual details necessary for 7