Lectures · August 14, 2025
Engineering Ukraine's Wirtschaftswunder: NBER Working Paper 34103.
Akcigit, Kilic, Lall, Shpak. Twenty-five years of firm data show why Ukraine's competitive economy hollowed out.
NBER Working Paper 34103, by Ufuk Akcigit, Furkan Kilic, Somik Lall, and Solomiya Shpak, was released August 2025. The paper applies twenty-five years of firm-level data to a single question: why did Ukraine's competitive economy hollow out before the war, and what must reconstruction do to revive it.
Headline findings: top-four-firm market share rose from 49% (early 2000s) to 53% (2019). Productivity growth collapsed from 15.2% annually (2002 to 2013) to 3.7% (2014 to 2019). Industries receiving offshore-financial-center investment showed 27% lower entry rates. The full case study is on /research/ukraine.
