Publications

In order to understand a country as large and diverse as Russia, it is extremely important to consider spatial patterns of economic development. As Russia looks for new drivers of economic growth, it is important to understand the structural conditions that have defined economic development in Russia’s regions. This report uses the Economic Potential Index (EPI) methodology to identify the conditions that drive regional development. Economic potential is the level of productivity that is possible for a region to achieve given its structural endowments, which are characteristics that are hard to alter in the short run. The methodology used in this report combines quantitative analysis of drivers of productivity across regions with in-depth case studies that focus on the role of regional governments and institutions in converting endowments into economic outcomes. This methodology generates insights that are relevant for both national and regional governments. The first chapter of this report provides an overview of regional development in Russia over the last 25 years and identifies “Russia-specific” national structural conditions that may affect regional development. The second chapter discusses the results of an assessment of economic potential at the regional level and the factors that shape it in Russia. The third chapter focuses on the role of national and regional governance, policy, and institutions in promoting economic development of the regions. The final chapter proposes policy priorities for both regional and national authorities.

Information systems in different domains, such as healthcare, tourism, banking, government and others, record operational behavior in the form of event logs. The process mining discipline offers dozens of techniques to discover, analyze, and visualize processes running in information systems, based on their event logs. The representational bias (the language for processes representation) plays an important role in the process discovery. In this work BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) language was chosen as a representational bias and as a starting point for the process discovery, analysis and enhancement. BPMN is a common process modeling language, widely used by consultants, managers, analysts, and software engineers in various application domains. This work aims to bridge the gap between process mining techniques and BPMN. Existing techniques are often limited to a single perspective, e.g., just the control flow, subprocesses, or just resources. The goal of this work is to fully support the BPMN specification in the context of process mining and suggest a unified and integrated approach allowing for the discovery, analysis and enhancement of hierarchical high-level BPMN models. The approach proposed in this thesis is supported by tools that enable users to analyze discovered processes in BPMN-compliant tools and even automate their executions, using existing BPMN engines.

The twentieth century began with a deep identity crisis of European parliamentarianism, pluralism, rationalism, individualism, and liberalism―and a following political revolt against the West’s emerging open societies and their ideological foundation. In its radicalism, this upheaval against Western values had far-reaching consequences across the world, the repercussions of which can still be felt today. Germany and Russia formed the center of this insurrection against those ideas and approaches usually associated with the West.  Leonid Luks’s essays deal with the various causes and results of these Russian and German anti-Western revolts for twentieth-century Europe. The book also touches upon the development of the peculiar post-Soviet Russian regime that, after the collapse of the USSR, emerged on the ruins of the Bolshevik state that had been established in 1917. What were the determinants of the erosion of the “second” Russian democracy that was briefly established, after the disempowerment of the CPSU in August 1991, until the rise of Vladimir Putin? Further foci of this wide-ranging study include the specific geopolitical trap in which Poland—constrained by its two powerful neighbors—was caught for centuries. Finally, Luks explores the special relationship that all three countries of Central and Eastern Europe’s "fateful triangle" had with Judaism and the Jews.

Control of Discrete-Time Descriptor Systems takes an anisotropy-based approach to the explanation of random input disturbance with an information-theoretic representation. It describes the random input signal more precisely, and the anisotropic norm minimization included in the book enables readers to tune their controllers better through the mathematical methods provided. The book contains numerous examples of practical applications of descriptor systems in various fields, from robotics to economics, and presents an information-theoretic approach to the mathematical description of coloured noise. Anisotropy-based analysis and design for descriptor systems is supplied along with proofs of basic statements, which help readers to understand the algorithms proposed, and to undertake their own numerical simulations.   This book serves as a source of ideas for academic researchers and postgraduate students working in the control of discrete-time systems. The control design procedures outlined are numerically effective and easily implementable in MATLAB®

Preface It’s not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin We live in an era of rapid and unprecedented change. Driven by technological innovation and changes in the way we deliver services, the face of healthcare is undergoing a metamorphosis, shifting into a more person-based, technologically enabled, evidence-based, and responsive system. That is the theory, at least. But are health systems that are changing according to these plans heralding transformative change? And what do some of the best thinkers believe is the prole of their health system over the next 5–15 years? We believe this book represents the best attempt yet to answer those thorny questions. Very few people could reach into the health systems of 152 countries and territories and orchestrate a book of this magnitude. Jeffrey Braithwaite, as series editor, accompanied by regional editors, Russell Mannion, Yukihiro Matsuyama, Paul G. Shekelle, Stuart Whittaker, and Samir Al-Adawi, and supported by an extremely knowledgeable team at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, particularly Dr. Wendy James and Kristiana Ludlow, were just the team to accomplish this. The omnibus they have created is an invaluable source of predictions about the future scope and shape of health systems across low-, middle-, and highincome countries. It is a treasure trove of important information. People will use it as a practical guide to the future in many ways: it can be read for benet and learning by region, by theme, and by specic case study exemplars of the kinds of reforms people are enacting in their health systems, extrapolated across the medium-term time horizon. Most books do not do this. The fact that this group has been able to achieve this is an endorsement of the skills, efforts, ingenuity, and expertise of the editors, editorial team, and individual chapter authors. We commend this book and recommend it as a must-read to many stakeholder groups: students of the system, policy-makers, planners, futurists, and groups representing managers, clinicians, and patients—in fact, all those who have an interest in healthcare and its future success. We enjoyed dipping xii Preface into it and thinking about its many learning points. We are sure others will too. Wendy Nicklin RN, BN, MSc(A), CHE, FACHE, FISQua, ICD.D President, International Society for Quality in Health Care Clifford F. Hughes AO, MBBS, DSc, FRACS, FACS, FACC, FIACS (Hon), FAAQHC, FCSANZ, FISQua, AdDipMgt, Immediate Past President, International Society for Quality in Health Care

This volume contains proceedings of the first Workshop on Data Analysis in Medicine held in May 2017 at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. The volume contains one invited paper by Dr. Svetla Boytcheva, 6 regular contributions and 2 project proposals, carefully selected and reviewed by at least two reviewers from the international program commit- tee. The papers accepted for publication report on different aspects of analysis of medical data, among them treatment of data on particular diseases (Consoli- dated mathematical growth model of Breast Cancer CoMBreC, Artificial neural networks for prediction of final height in children with growth hormone deficiency), methods of data analysis (analysis of rare diseases, methods of machine learning and Big Data, subgroup discovery for treatment optimization), and instrumental tools (explanation-oriented methods of data analysis in medicine, information support features of the medical research process, modeling frame- work for medical data semantic transformations, radiology quality management and peer-review system). Organizers of the workshop would like to thank the reviewers for their careful work and all contributors and participants of the workshop.

This paper drew extensively on the research under the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. The authors appreciate having been able to use the results of the research done together with Shishkin S., Director of the Center for Health Policy of HSE. The authors are grateful for valuable peer review comments provided by Dorota Nowak, Owen Smith and Somil Nagpal. This paper was produced under the overall guidance of Daniel Cotlear, Enis Baris and Andras Horvai.

The traditional narrative of the Russian Civil War is one of revolution against counterrevolution, Bolshevik Reds against Tsarist Whites. Liudmila Novikova convincingly demonstrates, however, that the struggle was not between a Communist future and a Tsarist past; instead, it was a bloody fight among diverse factions of a modernizing postrevolutionary state. Focusing on the sparsely populated Arkhangelsk region in Northern Russia, she shows that the anti-Bolshevik government there, which held out from 1918 to early 1920, was a revolutionary alternative bolstered by broad popular support. Novikova draws on declassified archives and sources in both Russia and the West to reveal the White movement in the North as a complex social and political phenomenon with a distinct regional context. She documents the politics of the Northern Government and its relations with the British and American forces who had occupied the ports of Murmansk and Arkhangelsk at the end of World War I. As the civil war continued, the increasing involvement of the local population transformed the conflict into a ferocious "people's war" until remaining White forces under General Evgenii Miller evacuated the region in February 1920.

While workers movements have been largely phased out and considered out-dated in most parts of the world during the 1990s, the 21st century has seen a surge in new and unprecedented forms of strikes and workers organisations. The collection of essays in this book, spanning countries across global South and North, provides an account of strikes and working class resistance in the 21st century. Through original case studies, the book looks at the various shades of workers’ movements, analysing different forms of popular organisation as responses to new social and economic conditions, such as restructuring of work and new areas of investment.

The materials of The International Scientific – Practical Conference is presented below.

The Conference reflects the modern state of innovation in education, science, industry and social-economic sphere, from the standpoint of introducing new information technologies.

It is interesting for a wide range of researchers, teachers, graduate students and professionals in the field of innovation and information technologies.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Computer Science Symposium in Russia, CSR 2018, held in Moscow, Russia, in May 2018.

The 24 full papers presented together with 7 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions.  The papers cover a wide range of topics such as algorithms and data structures; combinatorial optimization; constraint solving; computational complexity; cryptography; combinatorics in computer science; formal languages and automata; algorithms for concurrent and distributed systems; networks; and proof theory and applications of logic to computer science.  

MWENT-2018, the first Moscow Workshop on Electronic and Networking Technologies that is just started but is supposed to be a premium international conference fully sponsored by the IEEE Russia Central Section and Electron Devices Society of the IEEE. The uniqueness of MWENT among first-class international conferences is that it is held in rapidlygrowing place providing opportunities for exchanging information and ideas in electronic and networking field. The MWENT Workshop Technical Program Committee has established the level of the event to connect scientists with professionals, encourage students and young professionals to do research and support the transfer of research results into industry and supporting activities. They want to keep an appropriate environment for development of national Electron industry and society in general. The papers, sessions and keynote presentations have been selected to highlight both the longestablished fields in electronic and networking technologies and the newer areas as optoelectronics where micro- and nanoelectronics will contribute substantially to the well-being of mankind.

Because the conference is limited to three days, it was necessary to reject almost twice as many papers contributed. The final selection was made by the program committee team at online meetings, who worked diligently to evaluate over 350 papers. Proceedings contains the full-length papers of all invited and regular papers followed by all the MWENT contributed papers grouped by Sessions. The selected papers are organized in four parallel tracks of Sessions made of 5 to 7 papers grouped around topics of MWENT namely: wireless communication circuits and systems, control systems, RF circuits, networks, data converters, sensors, and micro- and nanosystems.

"Zholkovsky’s work—vast in scope and eclectic in methodology—has long been humanizing semiotics in both the Russian and American academy, giving it a face, a sense of humor, a stake in the real worlds we live by, but never losing its structuralist bedrock. The essays collected here, which range from Pushkin to Fyodor Karamazov, Okudzhava and Sedakova, from Peter the Great’s scandals abroad to Russian literary theory and filmmaking at home, are a goldmine by leading Slavists in North America, Europe, and Russia. A huge book of brilliant nuggets, it lights up the contours of our field today while paying perfect vignette-like tribute to Alik’s long non-conformist career, as fascinating and inscrutably flexible as it was often perilous.” (By Caryl Emerson). *** “This book is a wonderful gift not only for the 'jubilee celebrant' (for AZ it is impossible to imagine this phrase without quotes), but for all of us. The variety of topics, genres and authors might seem surprising were it not for the fact that this variety reflects the character of the book’s addressee. Its content, better than any manifesto or theoretical treatise, brings us good news: that a lack of intellectual inhibition, an unrestricted field of vision, and an enthusiasm that does not cloy are all so becoming to scholarship that, in essence, has as its sole palpable subject the infinity of creative choices. I have always liked Mayakovsky’s neologism: 'Do not jubilee!' (He himself, though, was very much concerned with his own anniversaries.) A / Z is completely devoid of the sedate smoothness of octogenaric jubilees, but it has a lot of panache and a spirit of intellectual adventure, and most importantly, fun. In this, the book bears a striking resemblance to its addressee.” (By Boris Gasparov).

The end of socialism in the Soviet Union and its satellite states ushered in a new era of choice. Yet the idea that people are really free to live as they choose turns out to be problematic.  Personal choice is limited by a range of factors such as a person’s economic situation, class, age, government policies and social expectations, especially regarding  gender roles. Furthermore, the notion of free choice is a crucial feature of capitalist ideology, and can be manipulated in the interests of the market. This edited collection explores the complexity of choice in Russia and Ukraine. The contributors explore how the new choices available to people after the collapse of the Soviet Union have interacted with and influenced gender identities and gender, and how choice has become one of the driving forces of class-formation in countries which were, in the Soviet era, supposedly classless.

The book will of interest to students and scholars across a range of subjects including gender and sexualities studies, history, sociology and political science.

This is an advanced guide to optimal stopping and control, focusing on advanced Monte Carlo simulation and its application to finance. Written for quantitative finance practitioners and researchers in academia, the book looks at the classical simulation based algorithms before introducing some of the new, cutting edge approaches under development.

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I go?’), the noncurative (‘Let him go, I don’t care’), different types of habituals (gnomic, qualitative, non-generic), and perfective tenses (aorist, perfect, resultative). The book offers an overview of these features in order to gain a broader picture of the verbal semantics covering the whole North-East Caucasian family. At the same time it provides in-depth studies of the most fascinating phenomena.

Konstantin Trofimenko (PhD), Director of Centre for Research of Urban Transport Problems, Institute of Transport Economics and Transport Policy Studies, and Nikita Krupenskiy (PhD), a senior research fellow at the Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, both at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, explain how digitalisation has been introduced to the cities of Russia and how its continued development is making city spaces and transport networks smarter.

Today’s Russia is a hostile environment for genuine political activity, and especially for movements that aim at changing the current power structure. This is due to the factually limited manoeuvre space of oppositional actors who face obstacles in the form of repression, surveillance and restricted access to the public sphere. Moreover, society is largely apolitical, with political activity often considered futile, immoral, or dangerous. In this profile, we portray the electoral campaign of the opposition politician and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny, who built a popular movement around his bid to participate in the 2018 presidential elections. Although the campaign failed to build up sufficient pressure for Navalny to be granted access to the elections, and despite the strong hierarchy inside his campaign, we argue that it contributed to the politicization of parts of the younger generation in the country’s provinces – which may have greater long-term effects than any concrete projects envisioned or controlled by the campaign’s strategists.

This paper tests whether the implementation of a key market-oriented reform in post-Soviet Russia, property rights in land, proxied by the percent of privatized land by region, affected the pace of sub-national economic growth during two unprecedented expansion periods: 2001-2008 and 2010-2014. Individuals gained the Constitutional right to own land in 1993, but implementation was stalled. The pace of land privatization can be explained by arguably exogenous factors such as distance to Moscow, as well as climate and also regional political culture, proxied by concentration of votes in the 2004 presidential election. We show that this rate of land privatization in Russia’s regions was significantly associated with output growth in 2010-2014, confirming the policy importance of this measure for developing economies. Regions where private holdings expanded most rapidly with the enforcement of property rights in land, gained a competitive advantage in the growth process through increased investment in fixed assets and private consumption.

Background

A key component of achieving universal health coverage is ensuring that all populations have access to quality health care. Examining where gains have occurred or progress has faltered across and within countries is crucial to guiding decisions and strategies for future improvement. We used the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2016 (GBD 2016) to assess personal health-care access and quality with the Healthcare Access and Quality (HAQ) Index for 195 countries and territories, as well as subnational locations in seven countries, from 1990 to 2016.

Methods

Drawing from established methods and updated estimates from GBD 2016, we used 32 causes from which death should not occur in the presence of effective care to approximate personal health-care access and quality by location and over time. To better isolate potential effects of personal health-care access and quality from underlying risk factor patterns, we risk-standardised cause-specific deaths due to non-cancers by location-year, replacing the local joint exposure of environmental and behavioural risks with the global level of exposure. Supported by the expansion of cancer registry data in GBD 2016, we used mortality-to-incidence ratios for cancers instead of risk-standardised death rates to provide a stronger signal of the effects of personal health care and access on cancer survival. We transformed each cause to a scale of 0–100, with 0 as the first percentile (worst) observed between 1990 and 2016, and 100 as the 99th percentile (best); we set these thresholds at the country level, and then applied them to subnational locations. We applied a principal components analysis to construct the HAQ Index using all scaled cause values, providing an overall score of 0–100 of personal health-care access and quality by location over time. We then compared HAQ Index levels and trends by quintiles on the Socio-demographic Index (SDI), a summary measure of overall development. As derived from the broader GBD study and other data sources, we examined relationships between national HAQ Index scores and potential correlates of performance, such as total health spending per capita.

Findings

In 2016, HAQ Index performance spanned from a high of 97·1 (95% UI 95·8–98·1) in Iceland, followed by 96·6 (94·9–97·9) in Norway and 96·1 (94·5–97·3) in the Netherlands, to values as low as 18·6 (13·1–24·4) in the Central African Republic, 19·0 (14·3–23·7) in Somalia, and 23·4 (20·2–26·8) in Guinea-Bissau. The pace of progress achieved between 1990 and 2016 varied, with markedly faster improvements occurring between 2000 and 2016 for many countries in sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia, whereas several countries in Latin America and elsewhere saw progress stagnate after experiencing considerable advances in the HAQ Index between 1990 and 2000. Striking subnational disparities emerged in personal health-care access and quality, with China and India having particularly large gaps between locations with the highest and lowest scores in 2016. In China, performance ranged from 91·5 (89·1–93·6) in Beijing to 48·0 (43·4–53·2) in Tibet (a 43·5-point difference), while India saw a 30·8-point disparity, from 64·8 (59·6–68·8) in Goa to 34·0 (30·3–38·1) in Assam. Japan recorded the smallest range in subnational HAQ performance in 2016 (a 4·8-point difference), whereas differences between subnational locations with the highest and lowest HAQ Index values were more than two times as high for the USA and three times as high for England. State-level gaps in the HAQ Index in Mexico somewhat narrowed from 1990 to 2016 (from a 20·9-point to 17·0-point difference), whereas in Brazil, disparities slightly increased across states during this time (a 17·2-point to 20·4-point difference). Performance on the HAQ Index showed strong linkages to overall development, with high and high-middle SDI countries generally having higher scores and faster gains for non-communicable diseases. Nonetheless, countries across the development spectrum saw substantial gains in some key health service areas from 2000 to 2016, most notably vaccine-preventable diseases. Overall, national performance on the HAQ Index was positively associated with higher levels of total health spending per capita, as well as health systems inputs, but these relationships were quite heterogeneous, particularly among low-to-middle SDI countries.

Interpretation

GBD 2016 provides a more detailed understanding of past success and current challenges in improving personal health-care access and quality worldwide. Despite substantial gains since 2000, many low-SDI and middle-SDI countries face considerable challenges unless heightened policy action and investments focus on advancing access to and quality of health care across key health services, especially non-communicable diseases. Stagnating or minimal improvements experienced by several low-middle to high-middle SDI countries could reflect the complexities of re-orienting both primary and secondary health-care services beyond the more limited foci of the Millennium Development Goals. Alongside initiatives to strengthen public health programmes, the pursuit of universal health coverage hinges upon improving both access and quality worldwide, and thus requires adopting a more comprehensive view—and subsequent provision—of quality health care for all populations.

We empirically study how social capital influences individuals' preferences for redistribution to target groups using unique surveys of approximately 34,000 individuals across 68 Russian regions in 2007 and 2011. There is a positive relationship between social capital and support for government redistribution based on objective verifiable criteria. We interpret the results in terms of the perceived likelihood of cheating. Benefits to the ‘needy’ are at greater risk of being diverted to nondeserving claimants compared to benefits for which there are objective criteria, such as merit, being retired or disabled, or having many children. Our results show that when there is higher social capital in a region, there is also less tolerance for the possibility of cheating by recipients of government income transfers.

Corruption has been a constant factor in Russia’s political economy. From one era to another, the multifarious forms of corruption continue to pervade Russian politics despite sincere and insincere efforts to fight it. The election of Vladimir Putin as president in 2000 brought a new effort at consolidating and organizing authority in the country. However, far from eliminating corruption, politics of the Putin era have merely changed the form of corruption, integrating corruption into the “power vertical” through which Putin governs.

In recent years, corruption has played an ever larger role in the regime’s stability. It serves as a force to co-opt and control the political elite and to replace formal institutions with something more flexible and more amenable to the needs of a consolidated authoritarian regime. Only deep changes, such as higher levels of political competition, have a chance of reducing corruption in the long run. The approaching fourth term of President Putin will continue to increase the role of informal institutions in Russian politics, in which corruption plays an increasingly large role in the Kremlin’s management of the political process.

The morphology of aspect in many East Caucasian languages is usually described in terms of two aspectual stems. One stem, called ‘perfective’, derives perfective forms, including perfective past (i.e. aorist), perfective converb, perfective participle and other forms. The other stem, called ‘imperfective’, derives imperfective forms, including e.g. imperfective past (i.e. imperfect) and imperfective present, imperfective converb, imperfective participle and some others. Some of the imperfective- vs. perfective-based forms may be formally identical in terms of inflection (e.g. aorist and imperfect may be produced by the same suffix), but this is a matter of variation. In addition to the forms with clear aspectual semantics (e.g. aorist vs. imperfect), there is a number of forms that are not obvious in their aspectual quality. Thus, the prohibitive, expressed morphologically, is consistently derived from the imperfective stem. Imperative and infinitive, on the other hand, may be derived from both stems, thus distinguishing between perfective and imperfective, as in Dargwa (including Mehweb), or from separate secondary stems, as in Archi.

The parallels between East Caucasian languages are not absolute. The study of intra-family variation may focus on two different issues – the distribution of the forms lacking a clear aspectual meaning between the two stems (e.g. where do the prohibitive and the imperative or various types of special converbs go) or on the formal correlation between the perfective and the imperfective stem. It is the latter issue that I consider below. I study the mutual relation between the two stems, the ways in which they are formally different, and whether and to what extent one of them may be considered the primary one and the other derived. I will address this issue in three languages belonging to three different branches of the family: Archi (Lezgic), Mehweb (Dargwa) and Khinalug (Khinalug). My main conclusion is that, notwithstanding a plethora of patterns that differs across and within languages, the general tendency is that the imperfective stem is, in various ways, the marked member of the opposition, either straightforwardly derived from the perfective stem (Khinalug) or being structurally marked in the sense of Croft (2002).

I use the same parameters to arrive at conclusions comparable across the three languages, including:

 

formal asymmetry of the two sets of inflectional forms: if the two sets include comparable functional categories (past, general converb, participle, action nominal), are they produced by the same affixes?

 

(un)markedness of one of the stems in paradigmatic terms (structural markedness): whether one of the stems shows more irregularities and formal diversity, including especially expression of noun class agreement

 

relative morphological primacy of the two stems (morphological markedness): whether one of the stems may be shown to derive from the other;

 

The languages considered in the paper show different degrees of such asymmetry, from clearly asymmetrical Archi through Mehweb whose system seems to be perfectly symmetrical but where the imperfective stem is somewhat more marked to Khinalug where the imperfective stem is almost unequivocally derived from the perfective stem. The data comes from descriptions, including (Kibrik 1977) (also the dictionary (Chumakina et al. 2008) for Archi; (Kibrik et al. 1972) for Khinalug, and (Magometov 1982, Daniel in preparation) for Mehweb.

Sections 2, 3 and 4 treat Archi, Mehweb and Khinalug, respectively. Section 5 is a comparison of the three languages across the relevant parameters. Section 6 is a summary of the results.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led to the fact that a young generation of citizens in the new independent states grow up in conditions that substantially differed from their parents’ period of socialization. A large number of ethnic Russians, who previously lived in one state, now live in different countries outside Russia. The sociopolitical status of Russians changed dramatically: they became an ethnic minority and faced the challenge of adapting to their new life status. In this study we follow the trajectories of value comparisons between two generations within countries in minority and majority groups, within generations between countries, and a cross-country comparison of families.

We consider an optimal control problem that is affine in two-dimensional control. The origin is a singular trajectory in this problem. We study the structure of optimal solutions in a neighborhood of the origin. We use the resolution of singularity via blow up and the invariant manifold theorems to find a family of optimal solutions.

The article considers a system of factors that contribute to the successful development of national regions. The author emphasizes that, despite the fact that each factor is very important for the economic development different regions, the biggest effect can be obtained by using the entire set of factors due to the their interconnection. Such interconnection should be taken into account in the documents defining the development strategy of certain territories.

This chapter explains the entrepreneurial university concept and its place and role in the triple helix in its entirety. It further elaborates on its implications for university management, departments, faculty members and supporting organizations. Moreover it reflects the meaning of the entrepreneurial university for stakeholders, i.e., university boards, regional and national policy and administrative bodies, funding agencies, the business community, university ranking institutions and the global university community overall. The chapter provides a comprehensive understanding of the entrepreneurial university, which is increasingly important because stakeholders’ expectations towards universities are growing. This in turn leads to increased pressure on universities to move beyond their traditional roles and models towards taking responsibility for economic development, large scale basic education and targeted further education and the development of value from research. These expectations provide opportunities for universities, but impose threats on the existing models and practices. Recent literature on entrepreneurial universities is incomplete and mostly focused on the commercialization of research, technology transfer and the third mission of universities. The article expands the predominant thinking about entrepreneurial universities and gives a broader structured definition.

Abstract

Innovation has become a frequently quoted and lived central missions of universities. This book demonstrates however that the mission is not constant. New challenges and opportunities emerge at different moments in history and there are currently a number of important strategic orientations that universities need to consider and balance. Universities face the challenge to balance their different activities and missions in order to ensure sustainable impact on innovation ecosystems at different levels. The authors argue that entrepreneurial universities as we know them today will change their thinking and activities from being purely demonstrable impact driven towards an activity portfolio approach. The latter considers ongoing institutional and governance change paired with a selected number of activities which provide demonstrable and visible impact but also continuing to invest into the free mind blue sky driven work typical for such institutions. Even beyond this the entrepreneurial university features risk taking by means of a research and innovation friendly internal climate and organization which is driven by rigor but not administration and performance indicators.

The chapter provides a substantial overview of features and channels of knowledge and technology transfer in light of achieving impact from science and research. A taxonomy of transfer channels is proved and levels of impact from science and technology on innovation is proposed. It’s found that there are different levels of value generated from STI, each featuring different stakeholders with different agendas and expectations. The authors argue that to make knowledge and technology transfer impactful and sustainable a long term and holistic view and approach is required. Against most literature about technology and knowledge transfer this work presents an overarching overview of objects, channels and features of partners involved in transfer. It features technology and knowledge transfer from a holistic perspective and provides useful background for future empiric studies and impact assessments.

During the last decades the number of universities extending their initial education and teaching missions towards the triple helix and knowledge triangle paradigms, e.g. knowledge and technology transfer and innovation has increased substantially. In line with this evolution the term ‘entrepreneurial university’ became increasingly popular however until recently there is hardly a common understanding of ‘entrepreneurial universities’. The main perception of ‘entrepreneurial universities’ rests with a visible and measurable contribution of universities to innovation and entrepreneurship in a broader sense. Although this perception is plausible and convincing it raises many open questions which mainly point to university governance models. The innovation and entrepreneurial university paradigm requires a holistic view on university governance approaches which include the full set of universities missions and respective management routines. In this respect it’s of utmost importance that universities keep a “healthy balance” between their missions. This statement is frequently used in many instances yet thus far there is no clear indication what a “healthy balance” implies. The chapter provides first indications about entrepreneurial university governance and respective management approaches.

We explore the role and organizing capacity of foreign business associations (FBAs) in the Russian context. Considering the potential role of FBAs as effective intermediaries during time of aggravated international relations, the paper examines the problems and mechanisms of foreign firms’ interaction with key national partners in their host countries and describes the conditions that lead to effective dialogue between FBAs and national governments. The main phases and factors of evolution are identified for Russia’s two main channels of foreign firms’ collective actions: The Foreign Investment Advisory Council, which is chaired by Russia’s prime minister, and FBAs. A comparative analysis of the efficiencies of each channel finds that political, rather than economic or institutional, factors play the dominant role in explaining the shifting efficiency of collective action of foreign firms over time.

The signing of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement and the Kigali Declaration may signal a new push towards economic integration on the African continent. However, it remains to be seen how many more countries sign up, how successfully 'phase two' is implemented later this year, and whether the agreement can be built upon to more comprehensively promote trade in services and a reduction of non-tariff barriers.

In the last decade, advanced economies, including the euro area, experienced deflationary pressures caused by the global financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the anti-crisis policies that followed—in particular, the new financial regulations (which led to a deep decline in the money multiplier). However, there are numerous signs in both the real and financial spheres that these pressures are disappearing. The largest advanced economies are growing up to their potential, unemployment is systematically decreasing, the financial sector is more eager to lend, and its clients—to borrow. Rapidly growing asset prices signal the possibility of similar developments in other segments of the economy. In this new macroeconomic environment, central banks should cease unconventional monetary policies and prepare themselves to head off potential inflationary pressures. Failure to do so in right time may create serious macroeconomic and financial stability risks.

In recent years the Russian banking system has witnessed numerous bank license withdrawals. Many of the failed banks had significant volumes of retail deposits in their liabilities, thus, transmitting the default burden to the Deposit Insurance Agency and ultimately to the taxpayers. In their attempt to stay in the market banks may try to attract the depositor funds even more intensively when the failure is not far away. The main assumption of this paper is that banks raise additional funds through inflated deposit interest rates – the overstatement strategy – before leaving the market. We use unique data on Russian bank deposit interest rates for deposits of different maturities in 2015–2016 combined with data about bank fundamentals coming from their financial statements. The results suggest that if a bank offers too generous interest rates for deposits for 180-365 days this can be a signal of a significantly higher probability of license withdrawal in 3 quarters. In their attempt to urgently attract funds when moving closer to default banks assign the highest rates for the longest-term deposits, with the maturity over one year. The interest rates higher than the market average dramatically increase the probability of a bank failure in 2 quarters.

By adjusting their lending, banks can smooth or amplify the macroeconomic impact of deposit fluctuations. This may however lead to extended periods of disproportionately high lending relative to deposit intake, resulting in the accumulation of risk in the banking system. Using bank-level data for 8,477 banks in 129 countries for the 24-year period from 1992 to 2015, we examine how individual banks' market power and other characteristics may contribute to smoothing or amplification of shocks and to the accumulation of risk. We find that the higher their market power the lower is the growth rate of lending relative to deposits. As a result, in periods of falling deposits, higher market power for the average bank would be associated with a greater fall in lending resulting in amplification of adverse effects as deposits fall during relatively bad times. Strikingly, at very high levels of market power there is a threshold past which the effect of market power on the growth rate of lending relative to deposits turns positive so that "superpower" banks contribute to smoothing of adverse effects when deposits are falling. In periods of rising deposits, however, such banks lead to amplification and accumulation of risk in the economy.

Given its geographical location, the region is important to the EU in terms of security, stability, trade and transit routes. The Western Balkan countries’ economic and political prospects and their future within a European framework should remain one of the top priorities for the EU.

The study analyzes the construction of the network links of Vladimir Putin and Alexei Navalny with various issues of Russian public discussion in the national print media. The theoretical framework is issue ownership theory, according to which political actors have a range of issues that are most strongly associated with them. Ownership by the politician of topics that are perceived as important in the society determines his popularity among the population. In this study, we use the Integrum database, which contains extensive print media archives of approximately 500 Russian magazines and more than 250 national newspapers. We analyze the period from 12.12.2016 to 12.12.2017, i.е., one year after Alexey Navalny's announcement of his intention to participate in the presidential election in 2018. The analysis shows that Putin has more opportunities to form an agenda, as he attracts much more attention from national media than Navalny does. Putin is often mentioned in connection with economic issues and international relations, which attract the attention of the population and are perceived as important, while his activity in these spheres is perceived as successful. Navalny is associated with the issues of corruption, NGOs and civic activism. Corruption is an important topic for Russians, but the low attention of the media to Navalny does not allow him to gain the maximum benefit from owning this story.

We provide the combination of the Asian automotive trade case study and the analysis of indicators that may potentially reflect product quality. We try to assess the relevance of different indicators (particularly, weighted unit value, number of export lines, market share, Grubel-Lloyd index and relative net exports) for constructing an unbiased quality measure. We conclude that one should simultaneously use most indicators from the list to eliminate the impact of possible shocks on quality estimations.

We show that if a continuous self-mapping of the real line has the set of nonlinearity of nonzero Lebesgue measure, then it maps bijectively a certain set that contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions onto a certain set with distinct sums of pairs.

We consider the algebras M_p of Fourier multipliers and show that every bounded continuous function f on  R^d can be transformed by an appropriate homeomorphic change of variable into a function that belongs to M_p(R^d) for all p, 1<p<\infty. Moreover, under certain assumptions on a family K of continuous functions, one change of variable will suffice for all f in  K. A similar result holds for functions on the torus T^d. This may be contrasted with the known result on the Wiener algebra, related to Luzin's rearrangement problem.

The direct sum of irreducible level one integrable representations of affine Kac-Moody Lie algebra of (affine) type ADE carries a structure of P/Q-graded vertex operator algebra. There exists a filtration on this direct sum studied by Kato and Loktev such that the corresponding graded vector space is a direct sum of global Weyl modules. The associated graded space with respect to the dual filtration is isomorphic to the homogenous coordinate ring of semi-infinite flag variety. We describe the ring structure in terms of vertex operators and endow the homogenous coordinate ring with a structure of P/Q-graded vertex operator algebra. We use the vertex algebra approach to derive semi-infinite Plücker-type relations in the homogeneous coordinate ring.

Let X_1, ... ,X_n be i.i.d. sample in R^p with zero mean and the covariance matrix S. The problem of recovering the projector onto the eigenspace of S from these observations naturally arises in many applications. Recent technique from [Koltchinskii and Lounici, 2015b] helps to study the asymptotic distribution of the distance in the Frobenius norm between the true projector P_r on the subspace of the r-th eigenvalue and its empirical counterpart \hat{P}_r in terms of the effective trace of S. This paper offers a bootstrap procedure for building sharp confidence sets for the true projector P_r from the given data. This procedure does not rely on the asymptotic distribution of || P_r - \hat{P}_r ||_2 and its moments, it applies for small or moderate sample size n and large dimension p. The main result states the validity of the proposed procedure for finite samples with an explicit error bound on the error of bootstrap approximation. This bound involves some new sharp results on Gaussian comparison and Gaussian anti-concentration in high dimension. Numeric results confirm a nice performance of the method in realistic examples. 

We derive tight non-asymptotic bounds for the Kolmogorov distance between the probabilities of two Gaussian elements to hit a ball in a Hilbert space. The key property of these bounds is that they are dimension-free and depend on the nuclear (Schatten-one) norm of the difference between the covariance operators of the elements and on the norm of the mean shift. The obtained bounds significantly improve the bound based on Pinsker's inequality via the Kullback-Leibler divergence. We also establish an anti-concentration bound for a squared norm of a non-centered Gaussian element in Hilbert space. The paper presents a number of examples motivating our results and applications of the obtained bounds to statistical inference and to high-dimensional CLT.

We show how trade and communication costs interact to shape the way firms organize their activities across space. We consider the following three organizational types: (i) integrated firms in which all activities are conducted at the same location, (ii) horizontal firms, which operate several plants producing the same good at different locations, and (iii) vertical firms, which perform distinct activities at separated locations. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for the three types of organization to coexist within the same country, whereas firms located in the other country are all spatially integrated. We then study how trade and communication costs affect firms’ organizational choices. First, lower trade costs lead to fewer firms going multinational. By contrast, less expensive communication flows leads to more investment abroad. The reason for this difference in results is that the two types of spatial frictions differ in nature: in the proximity-concentration trade-off, lower trade costs weaken the need for proximity, while lower communication costs foster deconcentration.

Larger cities typically give rise to two effects working in opposite directions: tougher competition among firms and higher production costs. Using an urban model with substitutability of production factors and pro-competitive effects, we study how market outcome responds to city population size, land-use regulation and commuting costs. For industries with small input of land, larger cities host more firms which set lower prices whereas larger cities accommodate more firms which charge higher prices in industries with intermediate land share in production. Furthermore, for industries with high input share of land, larger cities allocate fewer firms with higher product prices. We show that softer land-use regulation and/or lower commuting costs reinforce pro-competitive effects making larger cities more attractive for residents via lower product prices and broader variety for a larger number of industries.

This paper discusses the impact of conformism on product quality, firm selection, and trade patterns. It shows that when consumers have a higher degree of conformism and/or their distribution of conformism becomes more concentrated, the equilibrium average demand falls while product quality rises in a closed economy. In an international trade context, this strengthens the home consumption bias when consumers conform to the behavior of local people. The home bias is mitigated under globalization where individuals tend to conform to people worldwide. The paper also discusses the conditions under which conformism and conspicuousness are reconciled.