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Современный менеджмент: вопросы теории и практики. Сборник статей аспирантов и студентов
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.
Having unique data we investigate informal employment and “envelope payments” as additional costs of worker displacement in the Russian labor market. In particular we analyze whether displaced workers experience
more involuntary informal employment than their non-displaced counterparts. Our main results confirm
our contention that displacement entraps some of the workers in involuntary informal employment. Those who quit, in turn, experience voluntary informality for the most part, but there seems a minority of quitting workers who end up in involuntary informal jobs. This scenario does not fall on all the workers who separate but predominantly on workers with low human capital. Being able to distinguish between involuntary and voluntary informal employment our study contributes to the debate in the informality literature on the issue of segmented versus integrated labor markets. We also pursue the issue of informality persistence and find that informal employment is indeed persistent as some workers churn from one informal job to the next. Job separations in general and not displacement events per se are associated with larger “envelope payments”.
According to the existing literature, informality rates for Russia vary in a wide range from slightly more than 5 to nearly 30 percent. The question arises: what are causes and consequences of so huge variation? Using RMLS data for 2009 the paper investigates the degree of congruence between several alternative definitions of the informal employment in the context of Russian labor market. Analysis shows that depending on empirical definitions informality rates considerably differ – from 11 to 24 percent. With different approaches not only scale of the informal employment but also its socio-demographic profile radically changes. Furthermore, the econometric analysis reveals that the conditional impact of particular factors on the risk of informality varies considerably from one definition to another. This suggests that that estimates of the informal employment for Russia could hardly be regarded as methodologically robust.
This paper is the first to analyze the costs of job loss in Russia, using unique new data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey over the years 2003–2008, including a special supplement on displacement that was initiated by us. We employ fixed effects regression models and propensity score matching techniques in order to establish the causal effect of displacement for displaced individuals. The paper is innovative insofar as we investigate fringe and in-kind benefits and the propensity to have an informal employment relationship as well as a permanent contract as relevant labor market outcomes upon displacement. We also analyze monthly earnings, hourly wages, employment and hours worked, which are traditionally investigated in the literature. Compared to the control group of non-displaced workers (i.e. stayers and quitters), displaced individuals face a significant income loss following displacement, which is mainly due to the reduction in employment and hours worked. This effect is robust to the definition of displacement. The losses seem to be more pronounced and are especially large for older workers with labor market experience and human capital acquired in Soviet times and for workers with primary and secondary education. Workers displaced from state firms experience particularly large relative losses in the short run, while such losses for workers laid off from private firms are more persistent. Turning to the additional non-conventional labor market outcomes, there is a loss in terms of the number of fringe and in-kind benefits for reemployed individuals but not in terms of their value. There is also some evidence of an increased probability of working in informal jobs if displaced. These results point towards the importance of both firm-specific human capital and of obsolete skills obtained under the centrally planned economy as well as to a wider occurrence of job insecurity among displaced workers.
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.