Article
Уязвимость макроэкономических моделей перед циклами мировой экономики: сравнительный анализ
The proceedings from the 15th EDAMBA conference, which took place at the University of Economics in Bratislava on 22nd November 2012 have been prepared as a joint refereed publication of participants presenting their papers at the conference. The aim of EDAMBA as an organisation is to promote the exchange of information, to enhance the mobility of PhD candidates, to promote research cooperation and to increase the quality of PhD programmes and to create an environment of excellence with a European perspective while pursuing the existing diversity.
The paper is concerned with questions of civic values and civic identity as they are experienced by Russian people in the context of global economic crisis 2008-2010. Empirical findings from Russian Public Opinion Research Center, Levada-Center, Edelman Trust Barometer surveys are used to outline how tensions, distrust and civic irresponsibility expressed by respondents in the context of financial instability may amplify understandings of “citizenship” and “civic identity”. Several trends characterizing the impact of economic crisis on civic identity in Russian society are discussed: the transformation of the common sense of “we-ness” in case of individualism’s growth and increasing reduction of trust to economic and law institutions; the problem of new political values formation; the specifics of citizens’ emigration intentions; the “status level” of citizenship; the effect of mental inertia.
Curriculum vitae of the economist and philosopher J.M. Keynes is given. Some cogitative communications with other economists-theorists are traced
New revised edition of the classical text J.M. Keynes' "The General theory of employment, interest and money " 1936
The article presents a review of events in the financial market in 2007-2008. The author studies the interconnection between macroeconomic policy conducted by the USA monetary authorities since beginning of 1980-s till now, and the risks which have concentrated in the financial system and resulted in the crisis. The author specifies the mechanisms of the crisis deepening and broadening, and gives her own evaluation to them.
In this paper following Ball (2012) I estimate the demand function for narrow money aggregate M1 in Russia for 2003-2012. I show that after inclusion of cash foreign exchange and relevant interest rate the money demand is stable in the long- and the short-run and estimated long-run elasticities and short-run dynamics of the money demand yields sensible values for the simple functional form. I also show that most of the short-run volatility of the money holding can be attributed to the slow speed of adjustment of the demand not to the unexplained shocks.
The welfare analysis of the monetary policy has been in the centre of macroeconomics since the Great Depression. Empirical observations of the Phillips curve suggest that prices are sticky in the short run and, therefore, the monetary policy may be used to smooth the business cycle and increase social welfare.
In an open economy where foreign shocks may be passed into the domestic economy the task of the monetary policy becomes even more complicated. Under high pass-through of exchange rate onto the domestic prices, monetary policy stops to be independent and should adjust to exchange rate shocks. Such a policy of smoothing exchange rate fluctuations is common in western economies (e.g. [Parsley, Popper, 1998]).
The problem of optimal monetary policy is extremely relevant for Russia. Although the monetary authority claims that inflation targeting is the main goal of the monetary policy, empirical finding suggest that the real exchange rate targeting is of major importance [Vdovichenko, Voronina, 2004]. Due to the rising flow of petrodollars, Rouble is experiencing significant real appreciation recently. But the fear to loose exports makes the monetary authority respond to this real appreciation by accumulating dollar reserves and increasing the money supply, thus preventing the nominal appreciation. Such policy leads to high inflation and benefits of some interested groups at the expense of others. That is why the optimal degree of intervention is in the centre of all political and economic discussions nowadays.
Recent empirical literature finds that prices are more sticky downwards than upwards. This effect it called «asymmetric price rigidity» and may result from money illusion of workers, collusive behaviour of firms or search behaviour of consumers. Therefore, in this paper we propose a model in which we assume downward price rigidity and determine the optimal monetary policy in case of positive and negative exchange rate shocks. We claim that while depreciation of the domestic currency should be accompanied by a significant rise in the interest rate, its appreciation of the same size should be accompanied by a much smaller cut in the interest rate. Then we test this claim on the Russian data.
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 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.