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IV Российский экономический конгресс«РЭК-2020» (сборник материалов)

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of hotel room prices in several European cities based on the data from Booking.com website. The main question raised in the study is whether early booking is advantageous indeed, and if so, how early should it be? First a script was developed to download more than 600 thousand hotel offers for reservations from 25 March 2013 to 17 March 2014. Then an attempt to discover more details concerning the early booking effect was made via basic statistics, graphical data representation and hedonic pricing analysis. It was revealed that making reservations in advance can be really gainful, although more data and research are needed to measure the exact numbers, as they depend on at least seasonality and city.
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.