Публикации

How do elections and post-election protest shape political trust in a competitive autocracy? Taking advantage of largely exogenous variation in the timing of a survey conducted in Moscow in 2011, we find that an election had little systematic effect on political trust, perhaps because vote improprieties were not new information. In contrast, the unexpected protest that followed increased trust in government. We argue that when autocrats permit protest unexpectedly, citizens may update their beliefs about the trustworthiness of the government. In this case, heightened trust arises largely from opposition voters - those most likely to be surprised by permission to hold the protest - who update their beliefs. Our results suggest that citizens may cue not off the content of a protest, but off the government's decision to permit it. In addition, autocrats can increase trust in government by allowing protest when it is unexpected.

The model of the real sector of the Russian economy is presented. It allows for the separate description of GDP and its components by expenditure both in constant and in current prices. Unlike standard macroeconomic models, the model proposed considers a set of Trader agents in addition to Producer agent. Traders are based on a set of CES-functions and allow to decompose the statistics available into a set of unobserved components. The Producer is based on a specific production function that performs well for Russian data and works with financial variables, such as credits and bank accounts. In contrary to the standard approach, the model is not linearized to get estimates of model parameters but is estimated directly using a set of nonlinear equations. The optimization is performed numerically and allows to get both series of unobserved model products and their prices and model parameters. The stability of the solution found is checked on simulated data.

Предложен численный алгоритм для моделирования двухкомпонентных вязких сжимаемых изотермических течений с поверхностными эффектами в 3D областях сложной формы с воксельным представлением геометрии. В качестве базовой математической модели использована регуляризованная система уравнений Навье-Стокса-Кана-Хилларда. Проведено моделирование растекания капли по плоской подложке и вытеснение одной жидкости другой в поровом пространстве реального образца горной породы. Результаты расчетов демонстрируют применимость и хорошую работоспособность использованной системы уравнений, соответствующей явной разностной схемы и алгоритмов ее реализации для численного решения рассматриваемого класса задач.

We propose a model that evaluates how much a network has changed over time in terms of its structure and a set of central elements. The difference of structure is evaluated in terms of node-to-node influence using known nodes correspondence models. To analyze the changes in nodes centralities we adapt an idea of interval orders to the network theory. Our approach can be used to investigate dynamic changes in temporal networks and to identify suspicious or abnormal effects in terms of the topology and its critical members. We can also transform the stability measure to the similarity measure in order to cluster the network in some homogeneous periods. To test our model, we consider the international migration network from 1970 to 2015 and attempt to analyze main changes in migration patterns.

The Central Banks discuss bank recapitalization arrangements. Markup to capital is needed because the current Basel approach is insensitive to some risks. As the Basel Committee moves from comprehensive risk modelling towards a revised, simplified, standardised approach, where one-two triggers measure risk, banking regulators increase demand for a capital add-on to meet unaccounted risks. The paper suggests the add-on estimates for the joint effect of the concentration and PD-LGD correlation risks leaving other unaccounted ones out-of-scope. The previous studies estimated add-ons for each risk separately. We show their joint impact on capital can be higher up to 5.3 times than the sum of two taken apart. Then previous results do not provide sufficient capital for a bank. We obtain that Basel underestimates the joint risk in 1.9 times on average. We expect that our contribution will be useful at least but not last for specialised lending (e.g. real estate and project finance), where the joint effect of concentration and PD-LGD correlation risks is the most observable.

Non-renewable fixed-term contracts are becoming more used instead of the traditional Russian model of open-ended employment. The authors examine the influence of institutional and organizational factors on the use of fixed-term contracts in Russia with data from a Sur-vey covering 3313 enterprises for the years 2009 to 2011. Probit and Tobit regressions are used to test several hypotheses about the use of fixed-term contracts derived from the litera-ture. The results indicate that state-owned and unionized enterprises are more likely to use fixed-term contracts; and a high level of perceived dismissal protection for permanent work-ers is positively associated with fixed-term contracts use. The incidence and intensity of fixed-term contracts are lower at enterprises with flexible wages. A significant impact of or-ganizational factors is confirmed for fixed-term contracts. Enterprises use less fixed-term contracts, if they have workers with tenure from 5 to 10 years and high job complexity.

On the eve of transition in the late 1980’s the perspectives of the economic development for most economies of the Soviet Bloc in Central, Southern and Eastern Europe seemed optimistic. They had been already industrialized; their labor force was relatively healthy and educated. Being technological backwards in many industries these countries had lots of opportunities for catch up, extending international trade and allowing the inflow of foreign direct investments. However, after two decades of transition these expectations did not materialize to the fullest extent. On the one hand, by 2008, the last year before the global financial crisis, GDP per capita of all post-transition economies grew, except Moldova and Ukraine. On the other hand, six of the twenty economies of the region increased the lag behind the twelve advanced West European economies (EU12). A reasonable question in this context is to what extent is this backward take-off caused by the command-economy past or some myopic country-specific issues of the post-transition development?

                With the growth accounting framework this study confirms the leading role of total factor productivity in late transition at the aggregate level. Delving into industry levels the literature shows that, at least, for some East European economies the key driver of TFP growth in most CEE economies was manufacturing. This is not surprising, because manufacturing was also one of the most technologically backward sectors of the economy in early transition with multiple opportunities for improvements through adaptation of better practices and ways of production from the West. So, catching up in technologies seems to be the most essential driver of the post transition growth.

                At the same time, this exposition of the story of growth in transition critically depends on data quality, essential for measurement of economic growth and productivity. That is why it is important also to take into account that transition in economies of the region coincided with the transition in state statistics from the Material Product System of national accounts to the United Nations System of National Accounts. All this is important for understanding of the lim