The research deals with the problems of measuring inequality of opportunity in health. One of the main difficulties is measuring individual health. To solve the problem, this study proposes synthesizing a quantitative health indicator using IRT-models. We tested this approach on RLMS data. As calculations show, with an increase in the number of health indicators, the assessment of inequality of opportunities in health increases. The maximum level was equal to 20.83%.

In the article, we use data of the household financial behavior longitudinal survey “All‐Russian House‐ hold Survey on Consumer Finance” and confirm the hypothesis that household saving behavior significantly depends on psychological and behavioral characteristics of the household head (while controlling for variables of income, type of settlement, education and demographic type of households). We show that higher financial literacy, satisfaction with relationships within the household, more responsible money management and better adaptation abilities, all other factors held equal, increase households’ chances of having savings. We also describe a typical household with a high probability of saving (assuming that the head of the household is financially literate): this is a high‐income household, its head has a higher or postgraduate education, and is highly responsible for money management. The presented econometric models and results are comprehensively assessed on the microdata for Russia for the first time.

This paper investigated the causality between expenditures and revenues of consolidated regional budgets of 83 subjects of the Russian Federation in the period from 2002 to 2019. Based on panel data, the Granger‐causality test was implemented with the calculation of critical values using the bootstrapping procedure for each individual region. The analysis is based on indicating the direction of the relationship between expenditures and revenues of regional budgets in the context of four hypotheses: “tax-spend”, “spend-tax”, “fiscal synchronization” and “fiscal disunity”. It has been shown that 25% of Russian regions fulfill the “tax-spend” hypothesis, 7% — “spend-tax” hypothesis, 47% — “fiscal synchronization” hypothesis, and 20% —“fiscal disunity” hypothesis. Regions in the “fiscal disunity” group are characterized by a high level of public debt, which for one‐third of them may create risks for their fiscal sustainability, and subsequently risks for the federal budget.

This paper aims at assessing the effects of terrorism on a range of female health outcomes in 20 sub‐Saharan African countries between 2002 and 2018. A causality test is implemented to find out if terrorism causes a deterioration in female health outcomes. Additionally, regression analysis is used to assess the impact of terrorism on female health outcomes after con‐ trolling for female education, seats held by women in parliament, average income, military expenditure, political stability, and the incidence of malaria. The causality analysis shows that terrorism is directly altering female health through its impact on mortality outcomes while its impact on the other dimensions of female health is indirect or uncertain. The regression analysis reveals that terrorism has a positive, significant, and robust impact on the lifetime risk of maternal death and the maternal mortality ratio meanwhile its effects on the fertility rate, the proportion of women living with HIV, and life expectancy are not significant. The findings suggest that African governments could improve female health outcomes by altering the root causes of terrorism with policies promoting the rule of law, ethnic and religious diversity, inclusive political dialogue, checks and balances, and strong political institutions.

A technique for assessing the concordance between true inefficiency of decision making units in a basic stochastic frontier model and their JLMS estimates is proposed. An approximate formula for Harrell’s C‐index is derived for the case of half‐normal distribution of inefficiency component. A simulation study shows that the approximation error is about 0.01 and that finite‐sample values of Harrell’s C are lower than asymptotic values. Hence, the approximate formula may be considered as an upper bound for the ranking accuracy of the stochastic frontier model.

Using the RLMS-HSE data of Russian workers from 2002 to 2019 we investigate the relationship between job satisfaction and its components, videlicet satisfaction in pay, working conditions and promotion opportunities. We compare quantitative contribution estimates for each component. We found that satisfaction with working conditions is the major contributor to overall job satisfaction.

This paper investigates how credit rating aggregation might lead to a more efficient estimation of key portfolio risk management metrics: expected credit losses (ECL) and risk‐weighted assets (RWA). The proposed technique for credit rating aggregation is based on the Markov Chain Monte‐Carlo methodology and leads to a statistically smaller variance of ECL and RWA than the naïve and distribution‐based alternatives. This conclusion holds for three public datasets and four simulated studies. The paper results might be helpful for portfolios that suffer from data insufficiency or rely on external ratings for credit risk assessment: portfolios of international companies, interbank loans, and sovereign debt.

Foreign market access cost, explored by Melitz (2003) in the heterogeneous firm model of international trade, is one of the essential assumptions that ensure a nice fit of model results to stylized facts. Selection of more productive firms into exporters is guaranteed by the ex‐ cess of export fixed costs, adjusted for variable trade costs, over fixed costs of production. While there is empirical evidence on export cost structure at the level of firms, there has been no evaluation of the overall size of these costs. This paper aims at filling the gap. First, the model of Melitz (2003) is extended to allow asymmetries between trading countries. Then, the parametric relation between aggregated economic parameters is derived, which allows estimating the ratio of fixed costs. Then the relation is estimated empirically for the universe of Russian firms from 2014 to 2019, and results indicate that the foreign market access costs are comparable to the fixed cost of production in this setting. These findings provide evidence of the empirical relevance of the partitioning condition.

In this paper we analyze pricing on a large online platform for short‐term rental housing Airbnb based on Moscow dataset in January 2021. We build a multiple regression model based on a hedonic price function. We identify the main price determinants and the features typical for the specified market. In addition, the results demonstrate the importance of applying quantile regression and geographically weighted regression for more detailed analysis of the determinants of short‐term rental prices.

This study examines whether South African unit trust managers can outperform the market and demonstrate distinct market-timing abilities under systematic dynamic risk. A conditional portfolio evaluation method is used under dynamic systematic risk. The BEKK-MGARCH model is applied to estimate the time-varying CAPM beta. The sample of the study includes 86 unit trust funds for the hardly studied multi-asset class between 2010 and 2019 in South Africa. The findings of the study show positive evidence that portfolio managers in the South African unit trust market possess some skills for market timing and outperformance. These results differ from most of the outcomes obtained through model-free performance-evaluation methods. The significant contribution of this study to the literature is in conditioning beta to both time and economic variables within the same asset pricing model, and then applying it to the emerging market of South Africa. Another strength of this paper is maintaining patient and formal adherence to econometric requirements of model validation. The empirical findings of the study should benefit portfolio managers, investors, and regulators with updated insight into the importance of considering both risk variability and changing economic factors in portfolio evaluation.