Olga Valisyeva used the political variation across sub-national regions of the Russian Federation under Vladimir Putin to understand how differences in the extent of elite fragmentation in autocracies affects the influence of resource abundance on the economic growth in the short run. She found that polities with fragmented elites underperform those with consolidated elites and link this effect to higher intensity of rent-seeking and higher costs of fights over rents due to the shorter time horizon of the elites.
Heike Hennig-Schmid analyzed the effect of a random audit including fines on individuals' honesty by means of a novel controlled behavioral experiment framed in a neonatal care context. He found evidence that individual characteristics (gender, medical background, integrity) are related to dishonest behavior.
Andrea Matozzi introduced a model of turnout where social norms, strategically chosen by competing political parties, determine voters' turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcement of social norms is low, the larger party is always advantaged.
On Wednesday, September 19 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held. A. Karpov gave a lecture on "On the Number of Separable Preference Profiles".
Anand E. Sokhey presented multifaceted approach to the relationship between religion and gun control, drawing upon the integration of Christian nationalist views, partisanship, and clergy messaging.
Jan Fidrmuc studied the impact of physical attractiveness of on productivity. He utilize a context where there is no or limited face-to-face interaction, academic publishing, so that scope for beauty-based discrimination should be limited. Using data on around 2,000 authors of journal publications in economics, he found a significantly positive effect of authors’ attractiveness on both journal quality and citations.
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"
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
