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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.

On Wednesday, March 21 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. N. Leonova gave a lecture on "A Review of Capital Flight Problem".

Topic: " Autocratic Rule and Social Capital: Evidence from Imperial China "

Abstract: This paper explores the impact of autocratic rule on social capital---defined as the beliefs, attitudes, norms and perceptions that support cooperation. Political repression is a distinguishing characteristic of autocratic regimes. Between 1660--1788, individuals in imperial China were persecuted if they were suspected of holding subversive attitudes towards the state. A difference-in-differences approach suggests that in an average prefecture, exposure to those literary inquisitions led to a decline of 38% in local charities---a key proxy of social capital.  Consistent with the historical panel results, we find that in affected prefectures, individuals have lower levels of generalized trust in modern China. Taking advantage of institutional variation in 20th c. China, and two instrumental variables, we provide further evidence that political repression permanently reduced social capital. Furthermore, we find that individuals in prefectures with a legacy of literary inquisitions are more politically apathetic. These results indicate a potential vicious cycle in which autocratic rule becomes self-reinforcing through causing a permanent decline in social capital.