Publications

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This report presented by the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge of the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE ISSEK) is dedicated to the statistical measurement of the creative economy of Moscow.

This publication gives a first ever classification of Moscow’s creative industries – sectors of the economy where the major part of gross value added is generated out of creative activity and intellectual property rights management, and provides a description of approaches to calculating key indicators of their economic and territorial development. Original assessments of creative employment and foreign trade of creative goods on the basis of official data sources, as well as infographic profiles of selected creative industries, are provided.

The report will be of practical interest to representatives of public authorities, managers and employees of companies, educational institutions, research institutes, experts and all involved in the creative economy agenda. 

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.

The main purpose of the manual is to revise and consolidate lexical and grammatical material based on authentic articles from the Spanish press, which can help students, on the one hand, to get acquainted with the socio-cultural realities of modern Spanish society, and, on the other hand, to learn how to work with texts of a great variety of topics covering four spheres of society (economics, politics, social sphere and culture). This manual may be useful not only to develop the language competence of students studying Spanish at the B1 or B2 levels, but also to expand their professional horizons.

In order to study the structure of society, sociologists usually distinguish several homogeneous social groups, or classes. The most common division consists of three groups: upper, middle and lower classes. Such a partition is traditionally based on a subjective (exogenous) criteria adopted by a particular researcher. In this paper, the distribution of households in Russian federal districts is modeled as a mixture of three lognormal distributions. The mixing proportions (probabilities) of the mixture components and the corresponding distribution parameters are modeled as functions of the individual characteristics of households. The result is an endogenous decomposition of household sample into three clusters (lower, middle, upper). This classification allows analyzing the difference between regions and the patterns of intergroup dynamics in the period 2014—2018. The approach used in this work has demonstrated great flexibility in analyzing the distribution of income, the dynamics of this distribution over time, as well as a migration between relatively homogeneous clusters. The use of mixture density function with endogenously determined probabilities allows for precise detection of the effects of the income heterogeneity determinants within each cluster.

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.