Cluster policy is recognized as one of the pivotal elements of state of art innovation policy. State support for clusters helps to take into account regional peculiarities and engage the most innovative local actors into the process of innovation policy drafting and implementation. Cluster development stimulates trust building and enhances knowledge spillovers among different organizations in the region. Finally the cluster approach makes innovation policy more systemic by coordinating measures aimed to support different actors (large companies, SMEs, universities, venture funds) towards comprehensive efforts linking the most perspective localized industries (ecosystems). The development of clusters has been determined as one of the priorities of the Strategy of Innovative Development of the Russian Federation for the period to 2020 which was confirmed end 2010. In the framework of this Strategy the first national cluster program was launched in 2012. The paper is devoted to the detailed description of the background of the national cluster program in Russia and its first phase the selection of the pilot innovative clusters which was implemented last year. Special attention is given to the comparison of planned design of the Russian cluster program with such widely known cluster programs as the BioRegio, InnoRegio and Les pôles de compétitivité. The similarities and peculiarities of the Russian program have been defined that allowed to identify several most significant areas for improvement

the article considers the main strategies of functioning of the Russian pharmaceutical industry, such as import substitution and localization of the production of medicines, promotion of innovative activities of pharmaceutical manufacturers and regulatory practices in the field of drug treatment. The author identifies the contemporary problems of the industry and justifies some priorities for improving the national industrial policy in the pharmaceutical field

In light of globalisation of knowledge generation, Science and Technology have opened up previously distinct borderlines now favoring overlapping if not merged fields. Hence innovation becomes more complex by bundling different technological solutions in new products, processes, services and business models, which stem from different scientific and technological roots. Thus spillovers are an essential precondition towards the establishment of new interdisciplinary fields of knowledge, science and technology. The paper reviews and synthesizes literature on spillovers, introduces a typology of spillovers and a taxonomy of spillover channels, estimates the economic impact of spillovers. Special attention is paid to assessing recipient’s capabilities to absorb new knowledge thus gaining advantages for own development. The author concludes that knowledge spillovers have a positive impact on performance of a recipient (company, country or region) as long as it possesses sufficient absorptive capacity. Spillovers might under certain circumstances lead to strengthening competition between knowledge recipients at the cost of the place of origin. Nonetheless the latter still is in a position to use instruments of legal protection of own knowledge (under certain circumstances), build on the existing competences and capacities and invest in the next frontier of knowledge and technology in certain fields and moreover create a boom in the field of knowledge and technology generated using marketing instruments extensively.

We show how one can twist the definition of Hochschild homology of an algebra or a DG algebra by inserting a possibly non-additive trace functor. We then prove that many of the usual properties of Hochschild homology survive such a generalization. In some cases this even includes Keller's Localization Theorem.

Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2931340  The aim of this paper is to investigate the role of Jacobian externalities stemmed from different technological sectors for international firms engaged both in environmental and in dirty activities. Firms’ innovation, measured, as the development of new patents, is a key factor behind the achievement of desired economic performances. Empirical literature usually deals with the integration between ecological efficiency and product value enhancement. The results of these studies lead to the lack of integrated innovation adoption behind environmental productivity performance.  In this work, we analyse the integration between more environmental goals in an original way, by applying different methodologies to compute technological proximity, based on the Mahalanobis approach. To this end, we use information from 240 large international firms, located in three economic areas: USA, Japan and Europe and we select their environmental and dirty patents from European Patent Office data.

Predictive remapping may be the principal mechanism of maintaining visual stability, and attention is crucial for this process. We aimed to investigate the role of attention in predictive remapping in a dual task paradigm with two conditions, with and without saccadic remapping. The first task was to remember the clock hand position either after a saccade to the clock face (saccade condition requiring remapping) or after the clock being displaced to the fixation point (fixation condition with no saccade). The second task was to report the remembered location of a dot shown peripherally in the upper screen for 1 s. We predicted that performance in the two tasks would interfere in the saccade condition, but not in the fixation condition, because of the attentional demands needed for remapping with the saccade. For the clock estimation task, answers in the saccadic trials tended to underestimate the actual position by approximately 37 ms while responses in the fixation trials were closer to veridical. As predicted, the findings also revealed significant interaction between the two tasks showing decreased predicted accuracy in the clock task for increased error in the localization task, but only for the saccadic condition. Taken together, these results point at the key role of attention in predictive remapping. 

The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.

The paper examines the institute of minimum wage in developed and transition economies and in a number of the developing countries. First of all the institutional mechanism of minimum wage fixing is considered. One of the sections explores the dynamics of absolute and relative levels of minimum wage. The special attention is paid to the impact of the institute of minimum wage on the labour market. The author considers the mechanism of transmission of the minimum wage increases on the employment and unemployment dynamics. The paper also contains the result of the empirical research. The experience of many countries witnesses that large increases in minimum wage levels lead to the stagnation of the employ-ment, especially of the disadvantaged groups. The negative effect is larger for the companies with higher share of labour costs and more active use of unqualified labour, that is small businesses and agricultural enterprises. One of the main conclusions is that the minimum wage is not an effective tool of the poverty reduction as the majority of the recipients live in households of average and upper average income.

The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.

The paper studies a problem of optimal insurer’s choice of a risk-sharing policy in a dynamic risk model, so-called Cramer-Lundberg process, over infinite time interval. Additional constraints are imposed on residual risks of insureds: on mean value or with probability one. An optimal control problem of  minimizing a functional  of the form  of variation coefficient is solved.  We show that: in the first case the optimum is achieved at stop loss insurance  policies,  in the second case  the  optimal insurance is a combination of stop loss and deductible policies.  It is proved that the obtained results can be easily applied to problems with other optimization criteria: maximization of  long-run utility and minimization of  probability of  a deviation from mean trajectory.

This empirical paper adds to competition and industrial organization literature by exploring the interplay between industry structure and competitiveness on local, rather than nation-wide, markets. We use micro-level statistical data for banks in two Russian regions (Bashkortostan and Tatarstan) to estimate Herfindahl-Hirschman index, Lerner index, and Panzar-Rosse model. We estimate Panzar-Rosse model in two ways: via the widely used price-equation that accounts for scale effects and then via a revenue-equation that disregards scale effects as suggested by Bikker et al. (2009). We find both regional markets to be ruled by monopolistic competition, although estimation by revenue-equation does not reject monopoly hypothesis for Tatarstan. Existence of sizeable locally-owned and operated institutions does not necessarily lead to higher competitiveness of the given regional market, and the results from non-structural methods of estimation suggest that bank competition in Bashkortostan is stronger than in Tatarstan. Going further away from aggregated analysis we compute Lerner indices in two product segments of Tatarstan – retail and corporate loans – and find that retail segment is significantly more competitive. Local banks exert more market power in corporate loans, while federal branches – in retail loans.

The Basel Committee of Banking Supervision initiated a discussion on the most efficient practices to prevent bank managers from excessive risk-taking. This paper proposes a game-theoretical approach, describing the decision-making process by a bank manager who chooses his own level of risk and effort. If the level of risk implies the variability of the future outcome, the amount of effort applied affects the probability of a positive outcome. Although effort is unobserved for the bank’s stakeholders, the risk level is under control, and is associated with certain indicators such as capital adequacy ratio or leverage level. The risk-neutral utility function of a bank manager and a binary game outcome of gaining profit or loss for a bank are assumed. Starting from the general incentive contract scheme having the fixed and variable parts of remuneration, it is proposed that differentiating the variable part of remuneration is sufficient to motivate bank managers to make fewer risky decisions. More precisely, the variable part of remuneration (e.g. the share of the bank’s profit) needs to be higher in proportion to the higher variance of outcome for the high -risk outcome case to stimulate a bank manager to opt for lower-risk decisions in place of higher-risk situations.

In this paper we elaborate a simple model that allows for the predicting of possible reactions from financial institutions to more stringent regulatory measures introduced by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) in regard to global systemically important banks (G-SIBs). The context is framed by a 2011 BCBS document that proposes higher capital requirements for global systemically important banks. We attempt to analyze bank interactions in an oligopolistic market that is subject to demand constraints on loan amounts and additional loss absorbency requirements introduced by the regulator. We distinguish between the bank’s announced funding cost that determines both the loan amount issued and the market interest rate, and the bank’s true funding cost that has a direct impact on retained earnings. We conclude that in a two-stage game both banks will announce the highest funding cost, thus reducing the amount of loans granted (in line with the regulator’s objective), but at the expense of a higher cost of borrowing established in the market. If the game is repeated, then both banks also choose lower loan amounts in the periods prior to the last one in which the declared funding cost is the lowest possible. It should be noted that the designated outcome also coincides with the findings of the Monetary Economic Department of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision.