News

Anastasia Burkovskaya introduced a model of electoral choice that allows for derivation of joint distribution of turnout and voter share from unobservable joint distribution of costs of voting and preferences over candidates. Under a set of mild assumptions, she showed non-parametric identification of joint distribution of costs of voting and preferences over candidates from observable data on single elections/referendum.

Konstantin Sonin used a global game approach to analyze a situation, in which the incumbent leader trades off the possibility of protest against him and the possibility of protests aimed to restore his power if he is dismissed in a coup. Thus, media freedom serves as an ex ante protection for such a dictator.

On Wednesday, June 20 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. G. Penikas gave a lecture on "Modelling Fraud Operations within Agent-Based Model of Russian Banking System"

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita studied deterrence in a world where attacks cannot be perfectly attributed to attackers. In his model, each of n attackers may attack the defender. The defender observes an imperfect signal that probabilistically attributes the attack. The defender may retaliate against one or more attackers, and wants to retaliate against the guilty attacker only. He uncover an endogenous strategic complementarity among the attackers: if one attacker becomes more aggressive, that attacker becomes more “suspect” and the other attackers become less suspect, which leads the other attackers to become more aggressive as well. 

Chris Berry explained the quantitative test of leader effects (RIFLE), that allows researchers to test a null hypothesis of no leader effect and also estimate the proportion of variation in an outcome variable attributable to leaders vs. other factors. To demonstrate the substantive value of RIFLE, he implemented it for world leaders, U.S. governors, and U.S. mayors and for several outcomes. This results improve understanding of where, when, and why leaders matter.

Chris Miller analyzed inflation and the distribution of income in early 1990s Russia and explained the failure to stabilize prices, making use of newly collected sources from the State Archive of the Russian Federation as well as Yegor Gaidar’s personal archive

Andy Eggers introduced a new approach to measuring and comparing strategic voting across voters that can be broadly applied given appropriate survey data. In recent British elections, he found no difference in strategic voting by education level, but he did find that older voters are more strategic than younger voters, richer voters are more strategic than poorer voters, and left-leaning voters are more strategic than right-leaning voters. 

On Wednesday, May 16 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. D. Frolov gave a lecture on "Annotation of a Document Collection by Finding Thematic Fuzzy Clusters and Parsimoniously Lifting Them in a Domain Taxonomy".

Topic: " Shocking Racial Attitudes: Black GIs in Europe "

Abstract: Can attitudes towards minorities, an important cultural trait, be changed? We show that the presence of African American soldiers in the UK during World War II reduced anti-minority prejudice, a result of the positive interactions which took place between soldiers and the local population. The change has been persistent: in locations in which more African American soldiers were posted there are fewer members of the UK’s leading far-right party, less implicit bias against blacks and fewer individuals professing racial prejudice, all measured around 2010. We show that persistence has been higher in rural areas and areas with less subsequent in-migration.

the Department of Theoretical Economics invites you to participate in «Dynamics, Economic Growth and International Trade» (DEGIT-XXIII) economic conference on 6-7 September 2018.