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In this article, we study the subnational variation in the deployment of the politically motivated coercion during Aleksei Navalny’s 2017–18 presidential campaign in Russia. We posit that the strategic consideration behind the use of coercion helps to explain why some subnational authorities relied heavily on repressive tactics while others abstained from it. As regime agents aim at preventing mobilization from escalating, in resource abundant localities they must be more proactive. Also, they have to develop organizational capacities and overcome political constraints. Hence, we expect higher intensity of repression in the cities where propensity and capacity to repress are higher, and constraints are lower. We test these propositions against the data on the incidents of coercion in 159 cities and find some tentative support for this theory.

In this paper, we investigate the endorsement strategies of municipal council members in Russia. Since 2012, the candidates for chief executive office are required to collect the signatures at the local level. Filtering had been an important political toll before the return of direct gubernatorial elections, however, for the latter there are specific requirements in terms of territorial quotas and coverage that can be used against the independent candidates. We theorize that partisanship, gender, and employment sector on individual level and political competition, population size, and budget autonomy on the municipality level are important in shaping the councilmembers’ decision. We test this theory against the data on 2020 Perm krai gubernatorial elections and find out that while the general pattern is largely in line with our expectations, there are nuances when it comes to supporting particular opposition candidates. This study contributes to the literature on electoral authoritarianism and subnational elections in Russia and to the general scholarship on the means of authoritarian control.

We provide a closed-form measure of the stock's factor-specific beta coefficient that allows for a delay in the reaction of stock prices to systematic information. This measure explicitly relates the stock's factor beta to the investment horizon and enables investors to determine the return measurement interval that is required for the stock's factor beta to fully reflect the stock's factor risk. Exploiting daily data on individual NYSE, Nasdaq, and AMEX-listed common stocks, we use this measure to estimate and investigate the properties of the stock's beta with respect to the market.

This research note introduces a new social media poll of supporters of Russian opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, conducted during his presidential campaign in 2017–2018. Borrowing items from n...

In this paper, I consider opportunities and limitations of modelling the political dynamics with the time-series instruments. Using the examples of the president Putin’s approval rating and readiness to join the collective actions with economic demands I demonstrate the analytical potential of autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA), autoregressive distributed lag model (ADL), and error correction model (ECM). Modelling the political dynamics faces a string of analytical dilemmas. This paper aims at identifying the basic choices in application of the statistical instruments to dynamic processes and helping the other researchers to navigate through them. While it is hard to account in a single paper for all the developments in the discipline, which has been substantially advanced substantially and technically i the last three decades, this text also aims at stimulating the discussion on the opportunities and limitations when applied to Russian politics.

In this paper, I explore how Russians attribute the responsibility for handling the economic crisis among multiple political institutions. Previous research established the link between the crisis and electoral results for the ruling party and other regime players, but did not address the question of the responsibility burden's distribution between branches and levels of public authorities in Russia. Using the results of representative survey and a novel instrument - comparative responsibility attribution index, which allows to assess the intensity of responsibility and the ordering of the institutions simultaneously - I demonstrate that Russians singles out the president as a chief responsibly for handling the crisis. Moreover, there exists a tight consensus about his role and place among other institutions. The federal government, the Sate Duma, and the governors follow his lead with the ruling party and mayors judged as the least responsible. Using spectral decomposition, I also show that Russian voters when it comes to getting out of the crisis also distinguish between the federal and subnational authorities. Finally, the individual-level analysis reveals that gender, age, political preferences, and crisis impact, but its significance caries across target institutions. The study contributes to the growing scholarship on responsibility attribution under autocracies and the ways the voters navigate the institutional complexities of modern polities.

We show that any adjoint absolutely simple linear algebraic group over a field of characteristic zero is the automorphism group of some projector on a central simple algebra. Projective homogeneous varieties can be described in these terms; in particular, we reproduce quadratic equations by Lichtenstein defining them.

This paper documents the patterns of opposition parties’ engagement with street politics in Russia. It claims that in the electoral authoritarian regimes like Russia under Vladimir Putin, public protests remain a viable instrument for reaching out to the constituencies and eliciting concessions from the regime. In addition, collective actions signal commitment and strength and help to overcome the media blockade usually imposed by the state. However, in order to be a successful player in contentious politics, parties have to develop organizational capacity. Using the data on more than 7000 protest events that took place in Russia in 2012–2015, I show that the regional party branches with higher electoral returns in federal and regional elections organize more protest events controlling for other possible determinants of mobilization. The Communist Party remains the major mobilizing force covering a large array of issues and demands. However, the loyal opposition—LDPR and Just Russia—and the liberal parties like Yabloko and People’s Freedom Party also consistently stage the public protests with their electoral performance on the regional level being associated with the level of their protest activity. Overall, the study shows that the organizational capacity of the opposition is necessary though insufficient condition for the parties to engage with street politics.

This chapter examines the organizational dynamics of the Russian third sector after the adoption of the so-called “foreign agents” law in 2012, which significantly restricted civil society organizations’ legal space and their access to key resources. Utilizing interviews with organizational leaders and activists in nine Russian regions as well as survey data on civil society’s interactions with authorities, we argue that despite the intent to target only a handful of organizations, the changes have affected a wide array of civil society organizations. We show the commonalities and differences in dynamics among organizations occupying various niches. We also document coping strategies and establish the sources of resilience of the third sector vis-à-vis the entrenching of the authoritarian state in Russia.

The article introduces the Ethnic Regional Autonomies Dataset (ERAD), which describes the contemporary population of politically autonomous regions established on the basis of ethnicity. We concept...

Die 2018 in Russland anstehenden Präsidentschaftswahlen stellen die Systemopposition - jene Parteien, die in unterschiedlichem Grade vom Regime kooptiert wurden, aber weithin von den Entscheidungsprozessen ausgeschlossen sind - vor die gewohnte Herausforderung: Soll man nun an dem wohlorganisierten Schauspiel des Kreml lediglich als Statist teilnehmen oder doch versuchen, die Grenzen des Möglichen auszuloten. Letzteres hängt stark davon ab, wieviel Ressourcen den Akteuren der Opposition zur Verfügung stehen. In diesem Beitrag soll skizziert werden, welche diskursiven, institutionellen und finanziellen Ressourcen die Systemopposition (KPRF, LDPR, "Gerechtes Russland" und "Jabloko") sammeln konnte, und dass nach Stand der Dinge ein breitangelegter Vorstoß dieser Parteien gegen das Regime höchst unwahrscheinlich ist: Ihre Wählerschaft schrumpft, sie verfügen kaum über eine substantielle Kontrolle über die regionalen Exekutiven oder Legislativen und die institutionellen Spielregeln, so dass sie ihre Position verlieren, sobald sie eine reale Bedrohung darstellen. Daher dürfte es für sie bei diesen Wahlen nicht um Expansion, sondern ums Überleben gehen. Allerdings bieten die Möglichkeiten, die sich durch den Wahlgang ergeben, im Zusammenspiel mit der beträchtlichen Anzahl unentschlossener Wähler der Systemopposition eine gute Gelegenheit, ihre Ressourcen auf eine Stärkung ihrer Verhandlungsmacht gegenüber der dominanten Partei zu richten.

In this paper, we analyze the scope and limits of protest event-analysis as a tool for studying political mobilization. Event-analysis is a form of content-analysis and allows for the reconstruction of the dynamics of contention and its key characteristics on the basis of different text sources (police and media reports, participatory observations, etc.). The inception of protest event-analysis is closely linked to the development of the comparative method in the social sciences and to the competition between the theories of collective action and social movements. The demand for wide cross-national comparisons and the quantification of social-political phenomena in addition to the pioneering works of Charles Tilly created the preconditions for a systematic collection of information on protest events. Four generations of event analysis led to the formulation of key concepts of collective action theory (“political opportunity structure”, “cycle of protest”, “repertoire of contention”, etc.), and also improved the techniques and procedures of data collection process, for example, by introducing the triangulation of sources using semi-automated coding. We also analyze the sources of systematic bias in data collection process (selective, descriptive, and research) and the possible means of correction. In addition, we compare the event catalogs of Russian protests and point to specifics of this case, namely, spatial heterogeneity, poor quality of media reports in absence of alternative sources, and the bias in media coverage towards big cities. Using the experience of the “Contention Politics in Russia” database development, we propose systematic methods and means which address the challenges of protest event-analysis in regards to Russia.

We give a simple proof of the Curtis' theorem: if $A_\bullet$ is $k$-connected free simplicial abelian group, then $L^n(A_\bullet)$ is an $k+ \lceil \log_2 n \rceil$-connected simplicial abelian group, where $L^n$ is the functor of $n$-th Lie power. In the proof we do not use Curtis' decomposition of Lie powers. Instead of this we use the Chevalley-Eilenberg complex for the free Lie algebra.

The paper investigates whether the choice of opening prices yields the same predictability of daily returns on individual stocks as the choice of closing prices. Based on the sample of NYSE, Nasdaq, and AMEX listed stocks for the period from January 2009 to November 2013, it is concluded that (a) the degree of predictability and implied forecasting accuracy of both types of returns substantially increase as smaller stocks are examined and (b) this increase is stronger for the open-to-open returns than for the close-to-close returns. This small-cap effect in the predictability of individual stock returns is stronger for the high-momentum stocks.

The paper examines whether the risk in the consumption of stockholders caused by incomplete consumption insurance is priced in the cross-section of average stock returns. Using Taylor series expansion of the average marginal utility of consumption, we show that the risk in the consumption of stock market participants can be decomposed into two components, insurable (hedgeable using financial assets) and uninsurable (caused by incomplete consumption insurance) consumption risks. We argue that the growth rate of average consumption may be viewed as a proxy for the insurable component of consumption risk, while the growth rates of the rescaled higher-order cross-sectional consumption distribution moments may be regarded as a multivariate proxy for uninsurable risk in consumption. Exploiting microlevel household quarterly consumption data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that both components of consumption risk are significantly priced when the limited stock market participation is taken into account. Neither the insurable and uninsurable components of consumption risk nor the Fama–French risk factors are rejected as capturing important components of systematic risk when tested against each other in an integrated multifactor asset pricing model.

Behavioral ecology is a field in which scientists try to predict behavioral choices, typically by estimating costs of behavioral alternatives even though those costs may involve different currencies. Researchers interested in motor behavior often have similar concerns, though the connections between these two fields have been largely unnoticed. The authors pursued a study of motor behaviors involving different currencies: walking over different distances and reaching over different distances. They found that the cost of reaching was much greater than the cost of walking. They also found that walking paths took into account hand preferences. The present study extends previous research on the neglected topic of the coordination of reaching and walking and provides a simple method that can be applied in other contexts.

We investigate the potential of the consumption CAPM with pessimism, doubt, and the availability heuristic in the agent's beliefs to resolve the equity premium and risk-free rate puzzles. Using the nonlinear GMM estimation techniques, we find that doubt and the availability heuristic play an important role in explaining the cross-section of asset returns. However, when taken alone, these deviations from rational expectations can not resolve the equity premium and risk-free rate puzzles. This result is robust to the assumption that the expected value of an uncertain prospect is nonlinear in the subjective outcome probabilities.

We propose a new approach to the estimation of the portfolio Value-at-Risk. Based on the assumption that the same macroeconomic factors affect returns of all assets in a portfolio, this methodology allows the generation of the sequence of hypothetical future equilibrium portfolio returns given the historical values of the underlying macroeconomic factors and the asset betas with respect to these factors. Value-at-Risk is then found as an appropriate percentile of the corresponding hypothetical distribution of the portfolio profits and losses. The backtesting results for the six Fama–French benchmark portfolios and the S&P500 index show that this approach yields reasonably accurate estimates of the portfolio Value-at-Risk. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A photon beam test of the 4 m long prototype lead/scintillating-fibre module for the GlueX electromagnetic barrel calorimeter was carried out in Hall B at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility with the objective of measuring the energy and timing resolutions of the module as well as the number of photoelectrons generated. Data were collected over an energy range of 150–650 MeV at multiple positions and angles along the module. Details of the analysis at the centre of and perpendicular to the module are shown herein; the results are σ E / E = 5.4 % / E ( GeV ) ⊕ 2.3 % , σ Δ T / 2 = 70 / E ps, and 660 photoelectrons for 1 GeV at each end of the module.

We propose a consumption-based capital asset pricing model consumption (CAPM), in which the pricing kernel is calculated as the average of individuals' intertemporal marginal rates of substitution weighted by the probabilities of holding the asset in question. These probabilities are conditional on available imperfect sample separation information and are estimated simultaneously with the parameters of Euler equations. Using data from the US Consumer Expenditure Survey, we find that the consumption CAPM with probability-weighted agents yields a more precise estimate of the agent's risk aversion compared with the model, in which the available imperfect information on asset-holding status is erroneously regarded as a perfect sample separation indicator. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We propose an approach to the estimation of the parameters of stochastic discount factor (SDF) models which is based on the idea that the next period joint distribution of the variables in a SDF and asset returns can be well approximated by their joint historical distribution. The estimates of the SDF parameters may therefore be found as the values of the parameters at which the mean of the historical distribution of the product of the SDF with an asset return equals one. Each time period, the estimates are updated using the most recent periods of data and hence can change over time. This method can be viewed as an alternative to the approaches that specify a particular functional form relating the SDF parameters to proxies for the state of the world.

This paper uses Monte Carlo simulations to examine the properties of the conventional Pearson and some of the most well-known robust to outliers estimators of correlation in the presence of general heteroskedasticity. We show that the tests of a random walk based on the Pearson autocorrelation coefficient, including the Lo and MacKinlay [1988. Stock market prices do not follow random walks: evidence from a simple specification test. Rev. Financial Studies 1, 41-66] robust form of the variance-ratio test, can be unreliable in the presence of some forms of conditional heteroskedasticity. As an alternative to the Pearson autocorrelation coefficient, we propose the median coefficient of autocorrelation. Our simulation results show that, in contrast to the Pearson autocorrelation coefficient, the median coefficient of autocorrelation is robust to conditional heteroskedasticity. When applied to exchange rate returns, the variance-ratio test based on the median autocorrelation coefficient provides stronger evidence against the random walk hypothesis compared with the Lo and MacKinlay [1988. Stock market prices do not follow random walks: evidence from a simple specification test. Rev. Financial Studies 1, 41-66] robust variance-ratio test.

In the canonical CCAPM, the coefficient of relative risk aversion is constrained to be the inverse of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. For theoretical and empirical reasons the two concepts should be disentangled. We suggest that disentangling may be obtained by replacing the future consumption stream not by a certainty equivalent of future utility, like in the recursive utility model of Epstein and Zin [1989. Econometrica 57, 937–969], but by an exogenous reference level of consumption, which, in a recursive way, assesses the expected future consumption.

The study shows that in the consumption CAPM with power utility the Arrow–Pratt measure of relative risk aversion differs from the utility curvature parameter when the lottery an individual faces is not actuarially neutral. This implies that the measure of relative risk aversion in the CCAPM with power utility may be different for different individuals and may change over time even when the agents are assumed to have homogeneous preferences which are presented by the power utility function with the time-invariant curvature parameter. Another implication is that the elasticity of intertemporal substitution deviates from the reciprocal of the relative risk aversion coefficient unless the lottery is actuarially neutral. The study also shows the importance of the result obtained for assessing the empirical performance of the CCAPM with power utility.

We depict the weight diagrams (alias, crystal graphs) of basic and adjoint representations of complex simple Lie algebras/algebraic groups and describe some of their uses.

Copyright: © 2012 Semenov A. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. All financial models are based on some simplifying assumptions about the behavior of market participants. One of such underlying behavioral assumptions is that the investors make decisions about buying or selling securities on the basis of their expectations about the future. An important element of forming these expectations is the agents’ beliefs about the likelihood of particular events or, stated formally, the subjective probabilities that the investors assign to different possible states of the world. It is observed that, when determining the subjective probabilities, people often make systematic mental mistakes by adopting some intuitive simplifying rules of thumb, or heuristics, for information processing rather than strict logic. As a result, the subjective probabilities may deviate substantially from the objective probabilities that are based on formal rules or analysis. This deviation in probabilities can lead to biased expectations that, in turn, can cause irrational investment decisions. Gilovich et al. [1] provide an excellent overview of the behavioral heuristics.

I review recently conducted measurements of $\gen$ as well as precision form factor experiments at high momentum transfer that will be performed with the 11 GeV electron beam at Jefferson Lab., Comment: Submitted to the XIII International Conference on Hadron Spectroscopy (Hadron 2009)

We compare the empirical performances of three risk-sharing arrangements involving idiosyncratic skill shocks: (a) where individuals are unable to directly insure their consumption against individual-specific shocks, (b) where agents strike long-term insurance contract with financial intermediaries involving a truth revelation constraint as in Kocherlakota and Pistaferri (2009) , (c) full risk sharing. Based on the widely accepted assumption of cross-sectional log-normality of individual consumption levels, we work out closed form expressions of the pricing kernels for (a) and (b). We put these three models to test four financial market anomalies, namely the equity premium, currency premium, risk-free rate, and consumption-real exchange rate puzzles simultaneously in an integrated framework. We find that the pricing kernel associated with (a) outperforms the other two models in terms of the produced estimates of the agent’s preference parameters and the model ability to predict the equity and currency premia, the risk-free rate, and the log growth in the exchange rate. However, the predictive ability is still far from satisfactory for all three models under scrutiny.

To assess the potential of incomplete consumption insurance for explaining the equity premium and the risk-free rate of return, we use a Taylor series expansion of the individual's marginal utility of consumption around the conditional expectation of consumption and derive an approximate equilibrium model for expected returns. In this model, the priced risk factors are the cross-moments of return with the moments of the cross-sectional distribution of individual consumption and the coefficients of the risk factors are determined by the derivatives of the utility function. Using this approach allows to avoid an ad hoc specification of preferences and to consider a general class of utility functions when addressing the question of the effect of a particular moment of the cross-sectional distribution of individual consumption on the expected equity premium and risk-free interest rate. We demonstrate that if consumers exhibit decreasing and convex absolute prudence, then the cross-sectional mean and skewness of individual consumption help explain the equity premium if their cross-moments with the excess market portfolio return are positive, while the cross-sectional variance and kurtosis always lower the equity premium explained by the model. The empirical investigation uses the data on the monthly household consumption of nondurables and services, reconstructed from the Consumer Expenditure Survey database. The Hansen-Jagannathan volatility bound analysis, calibration, and GMM analysis results show that under the CRRA preferences, the model can reproduce the observed equity premium and risk-free rate with economically plausible values of the relative risk aversion coefficient (between 0.6 and 1.6) and the time discount factor when the cross-sectional skewness of individual consumption, combined with the cross-sectional mean and variance, is taken into account