Publications

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article presents the findings from an empirical study of leadership and power in three small towns in Perm Krai and Ivanovo Region, conducted in 2011–2015 and 2018–2019. The study shows that despite the centralization policy pursued by the federal center and the structured power vertical, there remains a wide variability of the patterns of power and leadership, due mainly to personal factors. We found both monocentric configurations of power (one local leader clearly stood out), and a polycentric power structure (alliances and/or rivalry of several actors with comparable power and influence). A change in the configuration of power actors can significantly influence not only the style of management and the nature of intra-elite relationships, but the power hierarchy as well. Leadership, like other social phenomena, is always in the process of change.The dynamics of power and leadership are most influenced by institutional changes in the structure of municipal government, new regional leaders, personal and situational factors. The outcomes of the study confirm the assumption that the heads of the executive branch are not always the most influential figures in a community, although they have the most significant formal resources of power. Not all heads of administrations in the towns we studied were actually the leaders of local communities, since they did not have sufficient authority, a strong team, or well-built relations with regional authorities. In cases where there was clearly not enough personal resources, the power vacuum was filled by other forces—either by other local actors or by regional authorities, strengthening control to maintain the order and manageability of the territory. The study has shown that a leader, although unable to completely reverse negative tendencies due to external factors, can mitigate their consequences. The deterioration of the socio-economic situation in small towns can be halted if the heads of towns and other representatives of the elite pool are able to take on leadership functions and use them to achieve the common good. In times of crisis and institutional reform, the role of leaders increases. Therefore, when difficulties arise, a demand for leadership is formed.

The global economy is in recession due to the pandemic of the coronavirus infection COVID-19. According to available estimates, Russia's GDP in 2020 will fall by 2–8%, so that in its consequences the current crisis may be tougher than the crises of 1998 and 2008. In the coming years, the Russian economy will have to recover and enter a new long-term growth path. At what expense and in which industries will this happen?

The report based on the experience of previous crises using industry accounts of economic growth and Russia KLEMS data, examined possible sources of recovery of the Russian economy after the crisis of 2020. By analogy with the recovery after 2008, it is likely to be associated with increased demand for raw materials on world markets and the reaction of the Russian oil and gas complex. Stagnation after 2008 is due to a decrease in production efficiency, especially in the expanded mining complex, as well as the cessation of technological make-up. Growth stimulation measures should include finding ways to increase the efficiency of the expanded mining complex, stimulating the adaptation of advanced technologies, and preserving existing adaptation channels in times of crisis - for example, successful export-oriented industries integrated into global value chains.

This is a companion book to Asymptotic Analysis of Random Walks: Heavy-Tailed Distributions by A.A. Borovkov and K.A. Borovkov. Its self-contained systematic exposition provides a highly useful resource for academic researchers and professionals interested in applications of probability in statistics, ruin theory, and queuing theory. The large deviation principle for random walks was first established by the author in 1967, under the restrictive condition that the distribution tails decay faster than exponentially. (A close assertion was proved by S.R.S. Varadhan in 1966, but only in a rather special case.) Since then, the principle has always been treated in the literature only under this condition. Recently, the author jointly with A.A. Mogul'skii removed this restriction, finding a natural metric for which the large deviation principle for random walks holds without any conditions. This new version is presented in the book, as well as a new approach to studying large deviations in boundary crossing problems. Many results presented in the book, obtained by the author himself or jointly with co-authors, are appearing in a monograph for the first time.

This paper builds a theory of deregulation and roll-out of on-road competition in the public transport sector. Focusing on the dimensions of competition, ownership and authorisation, we identify five distinct regulatory regimes: public monopoly, regulated monopoly, unregulated monopoly, outsourcing to private monopoly and competition in the market. Our generalised theoretical framework allows for the direct comparison in the social welfare terms of the monopolies' outcomes and the fragmented market structure after deregulation. We formulate a set of parameter restrictions that make competition in the market preferable to public monopoly and competition for the market in the form of outsourcing. We also show the theoretical possibility of a ‘revised’ regulatory cycle forming a sequential transition between these identified regulatory regimes. Our model predicts possible policy reversals and the bypassing of certain phases of the cycle, that can occur due to technological advances, changes in fiscal constraints and institutional capacity improvements

The personal role of sub-national rulers is crucial for regional development in countries with weak institutions. This paper studies the impact of regional governors’ tenure in office and their local ties on procurement performance in Russia. To identify the causal effect, we construct instruments for governor’s tenure by exploiting the regional vote share of ruling party in past parliament elections. We find the evidence that governors who do not have pre-governing local ties in the region (outsiders) demonstrate predatory behaviour, compared to governors with local ties (insiders). Namely, governors-outsiders restrict the competition at awarding stage significantly more than governors-insiders. Moreover, for governors-outsiders this restriction becomes stronger with tenure in office, while governors-insiders do not demonstrate such negative tenure effect. We argue that this restriction of competition by governors-outsiders cannot be explained by the intention of better contracts execution: the delays in execution and the probability of contract termination either increase or keep stable with tenure for governors-outsiders and these outcomes decrease with tenure for governors-insiders.

I study a career concerns model in which the principal receives information about the agent’s performance from an intermediary (evaluator). I show that, in general, a biased evaluator is ex-ante optimal for the principal. The ex-ante optimal bias solves the tradeoff between ex-post optimality of the principal’s decisions about the agent and incentive provision. It is “anti-agent” (“pro-agent”) when the agent has an a priori high value (low value) for the principal. It increases with the strength of the agent’s career concerns and decreases with the degree of uncertainty about his ability. Delegating decisions to the evaluator dominates communication with her when ex-ante optimality calls for a sufficiently large bias.

 Any teacher, beginner or experienced, wants to teach an effective and successful lesson. The notion of effective teaching is rather difficult: two teachers can teach the same lesson, but differently, and both lessons can be effective. This article deals with some principles which can make a lesson effective, such as lesson management, lesson structure, students’ motivation to study, and class size. This research into students’ attitude to class size covers four groups from academic year 2016-2017 (faculty of linguistics at the National Research University Higher School of Economics – NRU HSE), six groups from academic year 2017-2018 (faculty of linguistics), and four groups from academic year 2017-2018 (International College of Economics and Finance – ICEF). Students’ replies to the question of whether they like to study in large or small groups show that most students prefer to study in small groups; the standard number of students in a first-year class is 15, but in reality can exceed 20. 

Commodity exporting economies display procyclicality with the price of commodity exports. Although financial frictions may amplify commodity price shocks, how they do so for net exporters is unclear. Using Russian data from 2001-2018 we estimate a small open economy New Keynesian model with a banking system and leveraged domestic firms who issue secured debt and may default on their unsecured domestic debt. The collateral constraint and default generate financial intermediation wedges that vary endogenously over the business cycle, amplify the estimated contribution of commodity price shocks, and reduce the importance of investment and discount factor shocks. With financial frictions, optimal policy is characterized by monetary policy with a lower inflation and GDP target, but has a significant role for targeting the creditto-GDP ratio through a combination of macroprudential tools.

The low temperature transport of electron, or vibrational or electronic exciton towards polymer chains turns out to be dramatically sensitive to its interaction with transverse acoustic vibrations. We show that this interaction leads to substantial polaron effect and decoherence, which are generally stronger than those associated with longitudinal vibrations. For site-dependent interactions transverse phonons form subohmic bath leading to the quantum phase transition accompanied by full suppression of the transport at zero temperature and fast decoherence characterized by temperature dependent rate k2 ∝ T3/4 at low temperature while k2 ∝ T2 for site-independent interactions. The latter dependence was used to interpret recent measurements of temperature dependent vibrational energy transport in polyethylene glycol oligomers.  

This paper presents a model of strategic competition between universities that accounts for the existence of positive spillover effect from -education (peer effect). It was demonstrated that in the presence of peer effect strategic competition results in inefficient student allocation between the two universities (biased to the high-quality university) and excessive quality differentiation. The model is used to analyze the implications of government funding policies as well as admission and quality regulation. It was demonstrated that traditional schemes of institutional funding and students’ financial aid programs like tuition fee subsidy, quality investment subsidy, or total cost subsidy reduce social welfare. At the same time, an introduction of provision of tuition-free education for the best students combined with a per-student grant provided to the university improves both students’ and social welfare. It was also demonstrated that tight admission regulation is not socially desirable while the introduction of minimum quality standards makes society better off.

NEW ECONOMIC ASSOCIATION Institute of Economics RAS, Faculty of Economics, Moscow State University MV Lomonosov Moscow School of Economics, Moscow State University MV Lomonosov IV RUSSIAN ECONOMIC CONGRESS Volume XXII thematic conference "ECONOMICS OF NATURAL RESOURCES" (conference proceedings) Co-Chairs of the Program Committee E. T. Gurvich, V. M. Polterovich, A. Ya. Rubinstein

The history of research in finance and economics has been widely impacted by the field of Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE). While at the same time being popular among natural science researchers for its proximity to the successful methods of physics and chemistry for example, the field of ACE has also received critics by a part of the social science community for its lack of empiricism. Yet recent trends have shifted the weights of these general arguments and poten- tially given ACE a whole new range of realism. At the base of these trends are found two present-day major scientific breakthroughs: the steady shift of psychology towards a hard science due to the advances of neuropsychology, and the progress of reinforcement learning due to increasing computational power and big data. We outline here the main lines of a computational research study where each agent would trade by reinforcement learning.

Strong-Δ-Rationalizability introduces first-order belief restrictions in the analysis of forward induction reasoning. Without actual restrictions, it coincides with Strong Rationalizability (Battigalli, 2003; Battigalli and Siniscalchi, 2003). These solution concepts are based on the notion of strong belief (Battigalli and Siniscalchi, 2002). The non-monotonicity of strong belief implies that the predictions of Strong-Δ-Rationalizability can be inconsistent with Strong Rationalizability. I show that Strong-Δ-Rationalizability refines Strong Rationalizability in terms of outcomes when the restrictions correspond to belief in a distribution over terminal nodes. Moreover, under such restrictions, the epistemic priority between rationality and belief restrictions is irrelevant for the predicted outcomes.