2022. vol. 26. No. 3

Ultimate essence of the human capital is in what workers know and what they are able to do, or in their productive skills. This study explores demand for various occupational and social skills in the Russian economy. Job structure and demand for skills posted by employers reflect technological level of the economy and its structure. However, the structure of demand for skills is observed poorly, if we rely on traditional data sources. In this study, we derive the information from vacancy ads posted on the website of one of the leading Russian internet job search boards during 2019–2020. Our sample consists of roughly 3.5 million ads, containing explicit sets of skills expected from successful job candidates. We select skills from job ads relying on key words and then aggregate them in groups. As the next step, we rank all aggregate skills groups and discuss their frequencies, taking into account their complementarity. Further on, we regress wages offered in ads on skills and controls, thus getting a skill premium for each skill group and their bundles. Many skills are complementary to each other and their combination in­ creases the premium. Our results suggest that social and client oriented skills as well as medium level occupational skills are in the highest demand on the Russian labor market.

The paper analyzes the impact of provider altruism and motivation on the out ­comes of pay-for-performance reimbursement in healthcare, where a fixed price contract on quantity is supplemented with a relative performance contract on quail­ty. We develop a theoretical model which forecasts the crowding out of most alt­ruistic providers. Using the example of Medicare’s nationwide natural experiment with a relative performance contract on quality (the data for 3000 acute care hospitals in 2004–2017, with the incentives contract implemented since 2013), we conduct an empirical test of the model predictions. We assume that altruism is hete­rogeneous across hospitals and the values of altruism in each hospital are higher for quality measures which are strongly associated with the patient’s benefit. The analysis employs dynamic panel data estimations to account for «habit-formation» and we exclude pre-reform and post-reform «regression-to-the-mean» effects by modeling the time-dependent long-term mean as a function of hospital characteristics. We focus on highest-quality hospitals and discover a deterioration of quality measures, which may be linked to the patient’s benefit (communication of patients with medical personnel and ability to receive help promptly). It may be interpreted as an illustration of the fact that relative performance incentive contracts may be associated with crowding altruistic providers out of the healthcare market.

Until the 1980s, the electricity industry was typically organized as vertically integrated monopolies. A combination of technological, economic and ideological prerequisites has led to the fact that, starting from the 1980-90s, market reforms in the electric power industry have become the world norm. It was expected that the introduction of market relations in the industry would lead to an increase in its efficiency and, accordingly, to an increase in the social welfare. However, in practice, reforms were often accompanied by problems at all stages of their implementation, and assessments of the results of reforms in various countries do not always provide an unambiguous picture of success. The paper summarizes the experience of reforming the electricity sector in terms of comparing the results expected from theoretical considerations with the problems that arise in the process of reforming and the practical results of the reforms. We have analyzed a large body of literature that has studied the results of market reforms in the electricity sector as a whole or their individual stages in different countries and at different stages of reform completion. Research demonstrates that in order to improve public welfare as a result of the reform, it is necessary to ensure an effective and flexible regulatory policy in the post-reform industry. One of the most problematic aspects of the reforms is the need to ensure that long-term investments in the electricity sector are attracted in volumes sufficient to ensure the reliable functioning of all segments of the industry in the new conditions. Another problem that often arises is the distribution of benefits from the reform, a signi­ficant part of which goes to companies in the industry and the state, while the benefits often do not reach consumers. An important conclusion of our work is that there are no unequivocal arguments in favor of eliminating the state from participating in the work of the electricity sector even after the introduction of market principles in its individual segments.

In this paper discussed is the question of using the hedonic method when constructing price indices adjusted for changes in the quality level of goods on the Russian market. In the first part of the paper several foreign works devoted to the application of the method to various groups of goods are reviewed. Also, there is a short review of real-life usage of the method by BLS, Census bureau and BEA.

In the second part an example of the application of the hedonic approach to Russian data based on information on prices and characteristics of mobile phones according to the Yandex. Mar­ket portal in the period from July 2019 to September 2021 is described. It is shown that the hedonic method is applicable in Russian conditions and shows statistically significant differences between the observed price change and the estimated adjusted indices. However, the lack of the necessary statistical information does not make it possible to adjust official price indices by the quality of goods.

The profitability and sustainability of the bank in the long term is largely determined by the quality of its management. Recognition of the importance of this factor is, for example, its inclusion as one of the components in the CAMELS rating system, which has not lost its popularity so far. At the same time, a direct quantitative assessment of the quality of management is poorly formalized and still represents a serious creative task. In this regard, an indirect assessment of this factor based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) has become popular. It allows you to build a production boundary for organizations implementing a technological process, the input of which receives several types of resources, and the product is also a multidimensional quantity. The distance from the point representing the organization to the production boundary determines the magnitude of its inefficiency and can be considered as a metric characterizing the quali­ty of management. The specification of the DEA model – the choice of input and output indicators – reflects the definition by the expert of the concept of the effectiveness of the organization and significantly affects the value of its assessment. Different specifications can lead to conflicting estimates of efficiency and, consequently, the quality of management.

In this study, for a fixed set of potential inputs and outputs, an assessment of the overall efficiency of banks is constructed, which accumulates the properties of estimates of partial efficiencies obtained for specific specifications of DEA models. An increase in the value of this estimate is associated with an increase in the values of estimates of partial efficiencies and vice versa. Thus, the resulting metric can act as an assessment of the quality of management of banks for a variety of possible definitions of their effectiveness. The overall efficiency metric allows banks to be ranked regardless of the specific specification of the DEA model, even at the production boundary, where all banks have the same maximum efficiency value. In addition, the study obtained additional metrics that allow analyzing the strategy for improving the efficiency (quality of management) for each bank. Each metric corresponds to a unique strategy. The number of variants of potential specifications of DEA models and the number of additional metrics introduced determines the depth of analysis. Using these metrics, you can get an answer to the question of exactly how a particular bank has reached the current level of overall efficiency. The authors also propose a method for comparing different DEA models based on the analysis of the relationship of the corresponding private efficiency with the metrics of overall efficiency and metrics of strategies to improve it. Quantitative results were obtained for a sample of open statements of medium-sized Russian banks that completed the reporting period without losses.

Many studies have agreed that innovation leads to product and process improvements, allows firms to grow more quickly, be more efficient, and ultimately be more profitable than non-innovators. In this study, we explore the impact of innovation (including product innovation, process innovation, organizational innovation, and marketing innovation) on firms’ financial performance and employees’ wages in Vietnamese agricultural firms. We take a survey from 257 agricultural firms in Vietnam and analyze our dataset with the Bayesian multiple regression ap­proach. Our results show that product, process, and marketing innovations positively affect firms’ financial performance, while organizational innovation contributes positively to an increase in average labor wage. These results give some inside implications for firms and the government in distributing resources efficiently for promoting different aspects of innovation.