Three essays on the Russian wheat export

Traditionally, the international wheat market has been considered as one of the best examples of a market with perfect competition. Accordingly, the law of one price would hold and all players would behave as price takers without any influence on the market price. However, the results from several empirical studies indicate that this assumption does not hold for all exporters and importers. Imperfect competition and price discrimination and thus market power seem to be present at least in certain segments of the international wheat market. While previous empirical articles examine the competitive structure of traditional wheat exporting countries, which export large quantities of highquality wheat to developed countries, and have established market share, no analysis has been carried out so far on Russia, a country which supplies mainly wheat of undifferentiated quality to developing and transition countries. [...]