Publications

Tandem alternative splice sites (TASS) is a special class of alternative splicing events that are characterized by a close tandem arrangement of splice sites. Most TASS lack functional characterization and are believed to arise from splicing noise. Based on the RNA-seq data from the Genotype Tissue Expression project, we present an extended catalogue of TASS in healthy human tissues and analyze their tissue-specific expression. The expression of TASS is usually dominated by one major splice site (maSS), while the expression of minor splice sites (miSS) is at least an order of magnitude lower. Among 46k miSS with sufficient read support, 9k (20%) are significantly expressed above the expected noise level, and among them 2.5k are expressed tissue-specifically. We found significant correlations between tissue-specific expression of RNA-binding proteins (RBP), tissue-specific expres- sion of miSS, and miSS response to RBP inactivation by shRNA. In combination with RBP profiling by eCLIP, this allowed prediction of novel cases of tissue-specific splicing regula- tion including a miSS in QKI mRNA that is likely regulated by PTBP1. The analysis of human primary cell transcriptomes suggested that both tissue-specific and cell-type-specific factors contribute to the regulation of miSS expression. More than 20% of tissue-specific miSS affect structured protein regions and may adjust protein-protein interactions or modify the stability of the protein core. The significantly expressed miSS evolve under the same selection pressure as maSS, while other miSS lack signatures of evolutionary selection and conservation. Using mixture models, we estimated that not more than 15% of maSS and not more than 54% of tissue-specific miSS are noisy, while the proportion of noisy splice sites among non-significantly expressed miSS is above 63%.

Using the unexpected outcome of Argentinian presidential primary elections in August 2019, which led to the country’s sovereign default, we investigate how the exposure of international bond funds to Argentinian sovereign bonds affected the discretionary sales of bonds by fund managers and flows by ultimate investors, conditional on fund liquidity and maturity structure. We find that more liquid and longer duration funds exhibit less sensitivity to pre-default funds’ exposure in terms of bond holding growth. Our second finding deals with asymmetric information among funds regarding the restructuring of post-default bonds and varying renegotiation costs. These costs are proxied by funds’ previous experience of holding the defaulted Argentinian debt interacted with fund’s distance to Buenos Aires. We confirm our hypothesis that the experienced North American funds with the lowest renegotiation costs retained more of their holdings of Argentinian bonds than all other groups

This paper introduces strong complementarities in labour into an otherwise classical Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides search model. Specifically, two workers are required to perform a task. The assumption of Nash bargaining is maintained to represent the Hosios condition transparently. We show that this setup leads to additional externalities that require more than a Hosios‐style condition to be met. The surplus must be shared between the workers so that the employer internalizes additional externalities. This makes implementing efficiency even more challenging.

This article identifies and evaluates the main trends and issues in the conceptual analysis of power, their dynamics, and current status. There are several interrelated basic trends in the conceptual analysis of power in the last decades: conceptual solutions have become more flexible; multidimensional view; synthesis of different approaches; expansion of the concept; blurring the borders between power and non-power. These trends require taking into account a significantly larger amount of empirical data and paying special attention to those forms of social interaction that are hidden from external observation. Expansion of the range of power forms increases the difficulties of their systematization, while interpretation and comparison of the outcomes of empirical studies have become more complicated.

The ability of nucleic acids to form double-stranded structures is essential for all living systems on Earth. Current knowledge on functional RNA structures is focused on locally-occurring base pairs. However, crosslinking and proximity ligation experiments demonstrated that long-range RNA structures are highly abundant. Here, we present the most complete to-date catalog of conserved complementary regions (PCCRs) in human protein-coding genes. PCCRs tend to occur within introns, suppress intervening exons, and obstruct cryptic and inactive splice sites. Double-stranded structure of PCCRs is supported by decreased icSHAPE nucleotide accessibility, high abundance of RNA editing sites, and frequent occurrence of forked eCLIP peaks. Introns with PCCRs show a distinct splicing pattern in response to RNAPII slowdown suggesting that splicing is widely affected by co-transcriptional RNA folding. The enrichment of 3’-ends within PCCRs raises the intriguing hypothesis that coupling between RNA folding and splicing could mediate co-transcriptional suppression of premature pre-mRNA cleavage and polyadenylation.

The paper explains long-term changes in birth, death rates, and in attitude to personal consumption by evolution of preferences by means of cultural transmission. When communities are culturally isolated, they are focused on population growth, which results in large fertility and welfare transfers to children, limited adult consumption, and lack of old-age support. With increasing cultural contact across communities, successful cultural traits induce their hosts to increase their social visibility by limiting fertility and increasing longevity via higher individual consumption. Empirical analysis confirms that social visibility, as measured by the number of language versions of Wikipedia biographical pages, is associated with fewer children and longer lifespan. The presence of notable individuals precedes reduced aggregate birth rates.

Approximately twenty years ago, Laurent Itti and Christof Koch created a model of saliency in visual attention in an attempt to recreate the work of biological pyramidal neurons by mimicking neurons with centre-surround receptive fields. The Saliency Model has launched many studies that contributed to the understanding of layers of vision and the sphere of visual attention. The aim of the current study is to improve this model by using an artificial neural network as the spatial component of a model that generates saccades similar to how humans make saccadic eye movements. The proposed model uses a Leaky Integrate-and-Fire layer for temporal predictions, and replaces parallel feature maps with a deep learning neural network in order to create a generative model that is precise for both spatial and temporal shifts of attention. Our model was able to predict eye movements based on unsupervised learning from raw image input, combined with supervised learning from fixation maps retrieved during an eye-tracking experiment. The results imply that it is possible to match the spatial and temporal distributions of the model to spatial and temporal human distributions.

Whistleblowing is a powerful and rather inexpensive instrument to deter tax evasion. Despite the deterrent effects on tax evasion, whistleblowing can reduce trust and undermine agents’ attitude to cooperate with group members. Yet, no study has investigated the potential spillover effects of whistleblowing on ingroup cooperation. This paper reports results of a laboratory experiment in which subjects participate in two consecutive phases in unchanging groups: a tax evasion game, followed by a generalized gift exchange game. Two dimensions are manipulated in our experiment: the inclusion of a whistleblowing stage in which, after observing others’ declared incomes, subjects can signal other group members to the tax authority, and the provision of information about the content of the second phase before the tax evasion game is played. Our results show that whistleblowing is effective in both curbing tax evasion and improving the precision of tax auditing. Moreover, we detect no statistically significant spillover effects of whistleblowing on ingroup cooperation in the subsequent generalized gift exchange game, with this result being unaffected by the provision of information about the experimental task in the second phase. Finally, the provision of information does not significantly alter subjects’ (tax and whistleblowing) choices in the tax evasion game: thus, knowledge about perspective ingroup cooperation did not alter attitude toward whistleblowing.

In dynamic settings each economic agent's choices can be revealing of her private information. This elicitation via the rationalization of observable behavior depends each agent's perception of which payoff-relevant contingencies other agents persistently deem as impossible. We formalize the potential heterogeneity of these perceptions as disagreements at higher-orders about the set of payoff states of a dynamic game. We find that apparently negligible disagreements greatly affect how agents interpret information and assess the optimality of subsequent behavior: When knowledge of the state space is only 'almost common', strategic uncertainty may be greater when choices are rationalized than when they are not--forward and backward induction predictions, respectively, and while backward induction predictions are robust to small disagreements about the state space, forward induction predictions are not. We also prove that forward induction predictions always admit unique selections a la Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) (also for spaces not satisfying richness) and backward induction predictions do not.

The present paper assesses the impact of general urbanization and urbanization patterns (the number of cities of a certain size in the region) on different phases of the regional innovation process: knowledge creation, implementation, and production of innovation production. Knowledge creation is measured by patent statistics, knowledge implementation – by the share of innovative organizations, innovation production – by the volume of innovation production produced by industrial organizations. We apply the dynamic panel data model technique by using data from the period of 1998 to 2016. Our results suggest that general urbanization has a positive influence on every stage of the innovation process, while the impact of different urbanization patterns varies depending on its stage. Million plus cities affect knowledge creation in the region but have no considerable impact on knowledge implementation and innovation production. At the same time, the presence of cities with a population from 0.5 million to 1 million people in the region positively influences more mature stages of the innovation process: knowledge implementation and manufacturing of innovation production. So far as the effective innovation development demands complete innovation cycle, not only million-plus cities should be considered as the main drivers of innovation, but cities of lower size (at least with population from 0.5 million to 1 million people) as well should attend the innovation agenda.

Matching students with universities in Russia occurs via a complicated procedure. Most students are admitted based on the Unified State Exam (USE)—a standardized government-organized test, while the most selective universities enroll the winners of the Olympiads—intellectual competitions for high-schoolers. Olympiads have a long history in Russia—enthusiasts organized the first mathematical competitions in the 1960s. Today, there are hundreds of Olympiads in which high school students compete in all school subjects and in non-curriculum fields, such as robotics, critical thinking, creative writing, and business. Some Olympiad awards (in most cases, at the university's discretion) open the doors to a bachelor's program bypassing all examinations; others exempt students from certain subjects in USE.

The paper characterizes the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism for allocating a good to buyers who face asymmetric budget constraints. The optimal mechanism belongs to one of two classes. When the budget differences between the buyers are small, the mechanism discriminates only between high-valuation types for whom the budget constraint is binding. All low valuations buyers are treated symmetrically despite budget differences. When budget differences are sufficiently large, the mechanism discriminates in favor of buyers with small budgets when the valuations are low, and in favor of buyers with larger budgets when the valuations are high. We also provide a characterization of the constrained-efficient (surplus maximizing) mechanism and demonstrate that it shares the above properties of the optimal mechanism.

A prominent approach to modelling ambiguity about stock return distribution is to assume that investors have multiple priors about the distribution and these priors are distributed according to a certain second-order distribution. Realistically, investors may also have multiple priors about the second-order distribution, thus allowing for ambiguous ambiguity. Despite a long history of debates about this idea (Reichenbach (1949), Savage (1954)), there seems to be no formal analysis of investment behavior in the presence of this feature. We develop a tractable portfolio choice framework incorporating ambiguous ambiguity, characterize analytically the optimal portfolio, and examine its properties.

Comparison of trends and peculiarities of financial systems in different countries, especially, in emerging markets, should start with setting the global context. The study identifies several periods of development of world financial institutions in the 21st century – deregulation (global optimism regarding financial development), re-regulation (change in the paradigm following the Global Financial Crisis), and deglobalization (growing divergence between conditions for doing banking in different countries). Progress of banking systems in EMs was additionally shaped by local peculiarities at the turn of the century, most of which were related to their location (e.g. European banks penetrated in CEE countries, Russian financial system was dominating in CIS). The common features of emerging markets was low banking services’ penetration and high promised returns. Through time, higher market saturation, technological advances, and trends in regulation and supervision increased degree of convergence in financial systems in developed and developing countries in what concerns main KPIs. That caused revision of focus towards greater attention to risk management and local needs. Global macroeconomic risks, related to countries with high debt, technological risks and changing clients demands will become the drivers of banking systems development in emerging markets.

Regulation of risks in banking is driven by evolution of financial intermediation and markets, and vice versa. The study analyzes a changing nature of financial institutions’ regulatory and supervisory trends in emerging markets over last 20 years, providing outlook for the future. Although the principles of the Basel Accord have long been the cornerstone of banking regulation in the world, precise requirements and scope were reformed and implemented in response to crises and global trends. At the turn of the century, the regulatory themes in EMs were focused on ensuring financial stability which was closely associated with regulatory and supervisory independence. However, the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 has changed the paradigm from partial improvements under financial liberalization regime to a world-wide regulation tightening on the basis of close coordination between regulators and supervisors in the world. The role of the G-20’s Financial Stability Board was to ensure that initiatives are implemented globally, which further enhanced convergence of financial risks regulation in EMs and DMs. In recent years, that uniformity started to decline as the number of local peculiarities and initiatives impacting banking business increases: some countries eased or lifted certain globally accepted restrictions, yet imposing local regulations (including financial sanctions). Functioning of financial institutions in emerging markets becomes more and more complicated. Moderns technological innovations enter spheres of compliance and supervision via RegTechs and SupTechs as a solution to this growing number of such inconsistences.

Females demonstrate greater risk aversion than males on a variety of tasks, but

the underlying neurobiological basis is still unclear. We studied how theta (4–7 Hz)

oscillations at rest related to three different measures of risk taking. Thirty-five

participants (15 females) completed the Bomb Risk Elicitation Task (BRET), which

allowed us to measure risk taking during an economic game. The Domain-Specific Risk-

Taking Scale (DOSPERT) was used to measure self-assessed risk attitudes as well as

reward and punishment sensitivities. In addition, the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale (BIS11)

was included to quantify impulsiveness. To obtain measures of frontal theta asymmetry

and frontal theta power, we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) acquired prior to

task completion, while participants were at rest. Frontal theta asymmetry correlated

with average risk taking during the game but only in the female sample. By contrast,

frontal theta power correlated with risk taking as well as with measures of reward and

punishment sensitivity in the joint sample. Importantly, we showed that reward sensitivity

mediated a correlation between risk taking and the power of theta oscillations localized

to the anterior cingulate cortex. In addition, we observed significant sex differences

in source- and sensor-space theta power, risk taking during the game, and reward

sensitivity. Our findings suggest that sensitivity to rewards, associated with resting-state

theta oscillations in the anterior cingulate cortex, is a trait that potentially contributes to

sex differences in risk taking.

The purpose of the article is to consider innovation development in Russian regions and suggest certain opportunities for BRICS member countries. Our findings implicate that for many regions in Russia, where innovation areas are absent, taking part in interregional cooperation may be a good chance to enforce their innovative performance. Our results also demonstrate that Russian regions can be successfully engaged in interregional collaboration through an open digital infrastructure and service platform, joint training programmes and internships. On this basis, the activities in order to facilitate cross-regional collaboration between different regions of BRICS member countries are proposed.

In this paper, we test whether sanctions applied to an entire group on account of the free-riding of one of its members can promote group cooperation. To measure the efficiency of such collective sanctions, we conducted a lab experiment based on a standard public good game. The results show that, overall, collective sanctions are ineffective. Moreover, when subjects are able to punish their peers, the level of cooperation is lower in the regime of collective sanctions than under individual sanctions. Both outcomes can be explained by a general disapproval of the collective responsibility for an individual fault: in the post-experimental survey, an absolute majority evaluated such regimes as unfair. While collective sanctions are not an effective means for boosting group compliance, there are nevertheless two insights to be gained here. First, there are differences across genders: under collective sanctions, men’s level of compliance is significantly higher than under individual sanctions, while the opposite is true for women. Second, there were intriguing differences in outcomes between the different regime types. Under collective sanctions, a person who is caught tends to comply in the future, at least in the short term. By contrast, under individual sanctions, an individual wrongdoer decreases his or her level of compliance in the next period.

We study the consequences of misreporting in settings where ambiguity-averse investors face uncertainty about two aspects of the firm: productivity and reliability of the information system. We show that the joint presence of these two sources of uncertainty distort the firm’s investment choices in opposing ways, leading to over-investment by large firms (to signal productivity) and under-investment by small firms (to signal reliability). Our analysis suggests that uncertainty regarding the reliability of financial statements affects both the level of the market-to-book ratio and its association with firm size. In addition, we show that, under plausible circumstances, reductions in uncertainty can be detrimental to social welfare: lower information asymmetry about reliability always encourages more aggressive misreporting and boosts investment, thereby exacerbating the possible over-investment problem facing some firms.

The goal of this study is to empirically assess the influence of the board of directors’ work experience diversity on the performance of Russian non-public companies. The board work experience diversity is measured by the diversity index proposed by the authors, as well as by the number of work experience types and categories. Russian boards are characterized by a low level of diversity, directors with work experience in the same company prevail, on the second and third places is the experience in other enterprises in the industry and the experience in the group of related companies. It has been established that there are no prevailing combinations of experience in industrial companies. A positive influence of the directors’ work experience diversity on the increase of companies’ return on capital from 2017 to 2019 was found. The analysis is based on the data from a 2018 survey of industrial managers conducted by the Higher School of Economics.