Working paper
LOOKING IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR: A THIRTY-FIVE YEAR RETROSPECTIVE ON THE RUSSIAN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY
This article sets out to describe the current situation in the social housing sector in Russia. The author presents the historical background of social housing in Russia, it’s development and current conditions in the context of the transition from planned housing sector to one governed by market relations. The article also contains the analysis of the key structural elements of the social housing sector and expert evaluation of how well the social housing works as a mechanism for improving the housing conditions of the poor and vulnerable groups of population. The important role in the article is given to the legal status of social housing tenants, rent-setting policies and the problems of social housing finance. The main development opportunities and the main challenges for housing policy are revealed in the final sections of the article.
Recent decades have witnessed an increase in the number of works dedicated to the analysis of effects of historical events on the choice of institutions and further economical and social development of regions. This article employs the new institutional economics theory approach to consider the choices regarding title to land and serfdom in Moscovy and Rzeczpospolita (earlier the Grand Duchy of Lithuania) in the 16th-17th centuries. The author emphasises the factors, which have affected the choice of institutional development trajectory, and considers the influence exerted by these institutes on the political and military development of these states. This article shows how the contingent property rights in Moscovy turned out to be competitive in the conditions of a considerable contribution of decentralisation factors to defence capacity and, opposite to the situation in Rzeczpospolita, ensured the formation of large and efficient troops. This work contributes to research on property rights and Russian economic history.
This study identifies how country differences on a key cultural dimension—egalitarianism— influence the direction of different types of international investment flows. A society's cultural orientation toward egalitarianism is manifested by intolerance for abuses of market and political power and a desire for protecting the weak and less powerful actors. We show egalitarianism to be based on exogenous factors including social fractionalization, dominant religion circa 1900, and war experience from the 19th century era of state formation. Controlling for a large set of competing explanations, we find a robust influence of egalitarianism distance on cross-national investment flows of bond and equity issuances, syndicated loans, and mergers and acquisitions. An informal cultural institution largely determined a century or more ago, egalitarianism exercises its effect on international investment via an associated set of consistent contemporary policy choices. But even after controlling for these associated policy choices, egalitarianism continues to exercise a direct effect on cross-border investment flows, likely through its direct influence on managers’ daily business conduct.
Russian multinational enterprises (MNE) expanded widely in the late 1990s through the summer of 2008 at the onset of the global financial crisis of 2008. The emerging market MNEs have now become a subject of intensive study with a particular focus on the actions and behaviors of firms from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). This paper attempts to flesh out the reputational and corporate social responsibility (CSR) aspects of this internationalization process. The paper finds that in select cases the reputation of a Russia MNE does play a role in their activities and that these emergent firms recognize host country stakeholders as an audience for concern when conducting OFDI.
Drawing on the neo-institutional approach in organizational theory and global strategy, we advance a theory on the impact that differences in cultural egalitarianism have on multinational firms’ decision of where to engage in foreign direct investment (FDI) across the globe. Egalitarianism expresses a society’s cultural orientation with respect to intolerance for abuses of market and political power; it shapes the ways in which firms holding power interact with different stakeholders. After presenting a series of case illustrations, we find a strong negative impact of egalitarianism distance on FDI flows in a broad sample of nations and for different entry modes. Our results are robust to a broad set of competing accounts, including effects from other cultural dimensions, major features of the legal and regulatory regimes, other features of the institutional system, and economic development. These results hold while controlling for origin and host country factors through a fixed-effects specification as well as by using instruments for egalitarianism. We also find that other cultural influences are important as well. Differences in cultural harmony are actually positively associated with increased FDI flows, likely because multinational firms seek countries with lower societal support for entrepreneurship. FDI further tends to flow from high embeddedness to low embeddedness countries, and we link this in part to international regulatory arbitrage on environmental protection regimes.
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.
портовый менеджмент, показатели деятельности, анализ эффективности, система учета, распределение издержек, методы анализа деятельности портовой системы
At present many industries reveal tendency for setting up of vertically integrated companies (VIC) the structure of which unites all technological processes. This tendency proved its efficiency in oil industry where coordination of all successive stages of technological process, namely, oil prospecting and production -oil transportation - oil processing - oil chemistry - oil products and oil chemicals marketing, is necessary. The article considers specific features of introduction of "personnel management" module at enterprises of oil and gas industry.
vertically integrated companies; personnel management