Publications

Using Major League Soccer as a unique dataset, this study examines the direct andindirect role of coaches’ experience in determining team performance. Inspired by labormarket studies, we applied traditional indicators of team salary structure and, unlikeprevious studies, empirically test the hypothesis that coach experience affects the way inwhich team salary distribution inuences performance. Our results suggest that coacheswith experience as professional soccer players improve team performance directly butworsen the negative effect of a skewed s alary distribution. Moreover, experience as aplayer is more important than coaching experience. (JEL D3, J3, M5)

In recent years, English has become lingua franca in the spheres of higher education and science in Russia: more and more university courses are delivered in English, university students and academics take part in international conferences and workshops, Russian scholars strive to publish their research findings in international peer-reviewed journals.

Such a shift of focus makes the ability to write a good quality academic text a necessary skill in the modern academic environment. However, as our experience of EAP practitioners shows, Russian L2 writers, having a good command of General English, often find it challenging to conform to the conventions of English academic discourse when writing their research papers or project proposals. Despite the existence of various types of software which can check grammar and/or style of a text (e.g. Grammarly, Ginger, Language Tool) and even provide feedback about errors (Dreschler et al., 2019), to our knowledge, there are no programmes focusing on linguistic characteristics of an academic text. Besides, in the existing literature there appears to be no clear rubric for academic writing assessment. The application Paper Cat developed by a team of teachers and students from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Perm, Russia, is aimed at facilitating students’ and researchers’ writing in English by identifying the most significant features of academic discourse. We used the world accumulated knowledge in EAP to develop the software that is able to assess an academic text against a set of criteria, i.e. academic discourse markers, selected from academic style guides, handbooks and research articles on EAP. Evaluating the ‘quality of academic discourse’ of the text in terms of style can be automated by using software to tag style markers in that text. At the heart of this approach is creating a repository of patterns which are needed to extract the markers mentioned above. The quality of an L2 academic writing is assessed against a set of criteria worked out on the basis of competent writing features analysis.

This paper examines the development and significant contributions in a growing array of relevant publications spanning from 1946 to date and discusses future developments of the wellness tourism topic until the year 2095. This perspective study traces down the wellness tourism evolution research by re-viewing and analysing an extant body of the relevant literature over the last 75 years. This paper builds a rigorous perspective review by examination of publications derived from several scientific domains, including tourism, medicine, economics, and social sciences. As a result of this study, wellness tourism can be attributed as a profuse and proliferating research stream in the recent 75 years. Its relevance to significant aspects of life, such as health and also due to effects on human, social, and economic wellbeing, drives its proliferation. The paper anticipates the relevance and topicality of wellness tourism studies for academic research in the next 75 years. This paper contributes to the theory by addressing the ambiguous nature of wellness tourism, recapping the debate on the most debated research questions, and revealing the perspectives for future research in this area.

The present investigation considers phenomenon of tourism     cluster as a theoretical  model of region  tourism complex administration. Basing on  authors’ approach to theoretical analysis, deep investigation  of the concept “tourism  cluster” was realized.  Following the results of the analysis  mentioned, we described a number of theoretical  approaches to  the category of tourism cluster.  All  the approaches mentioned  were  presented in two  different ways: static and dynamic ones.  The dynamic  model   provided  a  general view on historical  development   of the  category  “tourism cluster” in the scope of  economic theory.

Basing on complex analysis results,  we created our own  “system and  agglomeration” approach to  the  concept of “tourism cluster”. The  approach mentioned  was structured as follows: authors’  interpretation of  the category “tourism cluster”,   feature-based table, tourism cluster   graphical model, authors’ methodology of tourism cluster identification and  complex analysis of this  type system.

New methodology  was tested on the case of Perm krai.

The  set of theoretical  and practical  innovations suggested in the present research is  considered as universal  one and it could be used  in the practice of other regions  administration. The present  monograph could be recommended  to  the specialists  working in the sphere of  public administration ( specially  to those  of them who  is responsible for  tourism policy); to  students of  university programs  related with  tourism , economics, public administration and  to all of those who  are interested in the sphere of special development and tourism  development in the Russian Federation.

The article deals with the problem of creating a temperature regulator, which does not require preliminary tuning for a specific production plant. Authors proposed to use a matrix approach of fuzzy logic for this purpose. It allows engineers to apply the linguistic rules formulated in the most general form for industrial processes control. It also allows building simple control algorithms for complex nonlinear systems. To verify the correctness of the algorithm, authors assembled installation with heaters of various types, powers and inertia. The full-scale experiment shown that the developed prototype of the device allows controlling the temperature in various settings without initial tuning.

Architecture of the compressor equipment monitoring and control cyber-physical system (CPS) based on the InfluxData IoT platform is proposed. CPS consists of three subsystems: a subsystem of a physical object, a digital twin and an interface. As a technical implementation of the IoT controller, a measuring and control module based on a data acquisition, data transfer and control device - VIDA350, connected to the Telegraf data collection agent of the platform using the MQTT protocol, is proposed. The basic methods of processing raw data from energy meters and sensors of technological parameters, implemented in blocks of on-line and off-line calculations are given. The organization of the digital twin of the compressor using the database of time series InfluxDB and the relational database MSSQL, storing information about changes in the technological parameters of equipment over time, energy efficiency indicators, statistics on accidents and operating time, equipment models, etc., is proposed. Grafana system and FreeCAD is used for visualization of equipment in 3D. The use of CPS can increase the efficiency of operation of compressors due to the timely detection of air leaks, minimizing idling, minimizing peak consumption, optimizing process parameters and settings both of the compressors and consumers.

Standards and specifications are widely used in industry to define product and business process requirements, ensure interoperability, safety, and quality, so there is an acute question of how best to apply them in the process of their own production. One of the problems at the moment is the inability to effectively use the existing standards base due to its weak structure. As a solution to this problem, NIST presented the NOVIS system, which provides an interactive visual interface with terminology from standards related to sustainable production. However, this solution has a number of limitations, which are described later in the text, therefore it is necessary to develop our own system of semantic search in industry standards. The aim of this work is system design for intelligent search in industry standards based on ontological description and semantic annotation. It is necessary to consider the existing solution, to determine the requirements for the system, to develop an algorithm for its operation, to compare the tools for management and visualization of ontology to achieve this goal. The practical significance is to define the conceptual framework and build a graphical representation of the system for the further development of an intelligent search system that will allow companies effectively manage, properly understand and comply with industry standards.

We analyse the determinants of football fans’ happiness in the Russian Premier League using facial emotion recognition. We propose a new way of measuring subjective well-being and provide its empirical validation using sports data. Our sample consists of about 10,000 photos from football matches uploaded on the most popular social network in Russia during the seasons 2014/15–2017/18. The dataset of photos is analysed with the Emotion Recognition software, which takes a facial expression in an image as an input and returns the confidence across a set of emotions for each face in the image. Next we use multinomial logistic regression to identify the determinants of happiness. The results show that uncertainty and expectations are important drivers of football fans’ happiness. A win decreases the probability of being unhappy, and the effect becomes stronger for late rounds of a national championship. The change in happiness because of a home team win is stronger for males.

The Russian government has programs to assist Russian companies with financial and organizational support.  Award of procurement contracts may also serve as assistance to companies.  This paper uses data from a survey of Russian companies to draw inferences about the motivation behind the choice of recipients. Possible motivations are an intent to foster economic development, successful rent-seeking by recipients or simply corruption. The evidence is mixed.  There is support for both the economic development motive and rent-seeking in the analysis of financial and organizational support.  A role for corruption is most evident in the procurement contract results.

Growing importance of human resources places the role of managers at the core of company efficiency. However, there are studies that demonstrate the efficiency of teams without a manager, so-called self-managed teams, is higher comparing with managed teams. Thus, despite the focus on managerial efficiency in the economic literature, the issue of whether a team needs amanager is far from settled. In this paper, we use a quasiexperimental setting from e-Sports (competitive video gaming) to understand whether the hiring a manager is of benefit to team performance. The empirical part of the study is based on endogenous switching regression model. This method allows investigating what performance of self-managed team would be if it will have a manager and vice versa. The dataset includes the information of prize money and features of top e-Sports teams in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (e-Sports discipline) from 2013 to 2017. The main finding of this study is that managed teams perform better than self-managed ones but this is not due to the manager.

This article proposes a method of constructing dynamic neural network mathematical models that allow not only to diagnose the disease at the current time, but also to simulate the appearance and development of diseases in future periods of time, as well as to control their appearance and development by selecting the optimal lifestyle and optimal intake of drugs. It is assumed that the use of dynamic neural network medical systems, instead of static, allow doctors, before prescribing courses of treatment to patients, to test the effect of drugs not on patients, but on their virtual mathematical models. The action of the system is demonstrated by examples.

The most common tools to understand perception of food products are hall-tests, surveys, observations, etc. However to get reliable results these approaches require large samples, making them costly and time-consuming. Furthermore, they are also highly expert-dependent and rely on the assumption that study participants can express their preferences consciously and explicitly. Here we suggested an EEG-based approach to evaluate perceived product similarity in a cross-modal taste-visual task. Two candidate neurometrics measured from Fz electrode were tested: the amplitude of N430-620 from evoked response potentials (ERP) and the power of induced gamma oscillations during 400-600 ms period after visual stimulus presentation. Both suggested metrics showed a strong correlation with the perceived similarity scores at both individual and group levels, however N430-630 had greater inter-subject variability making it less suitable for practical applications. The results based on the power of induced gamma oscillations (N=18) not only reflected the results from traditional hall-tests (N=200) but also allowed better discrimination between different food products.

Government support to small business enterprises (SBEs) through set- aside (SA) public procurement auctions is a common practice. The effect of the SA mechanism is, however, ambiguous. On the one hand, SA auc- tions can attract more SBEs to compete; on the other hand, SA auctions restrict the entry of—possibly—more cost-efficient large firms. We inves- tigate SA auctions’ effect by exploiting an original Russian database on public procurement e-auctions for granulated sugar (a largely homoge- neous good) in the period 2011-2013. To identify the causal effect of SA auctions, we overcome two endogeneity issues: procurers’ choice of SA for- mat and firms’ decision to bid. In an empirical setting where confounding elements are minimized, we found that SA auctions’ effect largely depends on both the reserve price value and the level of competition. We found that there exists an optimal interval for the reserve price where SA auc- tions record lower procurement prices, as compared to non-SA auctions.

National economic development is subject to a number of restrictions. One of the main constraints is the threat of complete exhaustion of non-renewable resources and environmental pollution exceeding the capacity of the planet. However, the rapid spread of resource-saving technologies is reducing the environmental intensity of economic activities. In this study, I aim to examine the ecological-economic dynamics of the environmental effects of economic development in the regions of Russia’s North-Western Federal District (NWFD). I employ an extended version of Peter A. Victor’s model to produce a comprehensive evaluation of changes in economic indicators and correlate them with the total and specific environmental impact. I conduct a factor analysis to identify the main effects influencing the ecological-economic dynamics. The use of water resources in the NWFD demonstrates green growth, whereas electricity consumption and wastewater treatment fall into the brown zone and industrial and municipal waste treatment into the black one. The factor analysis has shown that population change has a very weak effect on the situation. Much more influential factors are the income effect (higher incomes translate into greater consumption and thus more significant pollution levels) and the technology effect produced by a decrease in the environmental intensity of production. To promote green development, it is advisable to increase the influence of the technology effect by stimulating resource efficiency and switching to the circular economy model.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of perceived food quality and consumer ethnocentrism and potential trade-offs between these two concepts in Russian consumers’ food purchase decisions after the implementation of the Russian import ban.The results suggest that most respondents do not consider domestically produced cheese as a risky product in terms of food safety but simply of lower quality than imported cheese. However, the average respondent’s WTP discount for domestic cheese compared to imported cheese is 8 percent, which is relatively small. This corresponds to participants’ opinion that buying domestic cheese is the right thing to do since it supports Russian farmers and producers. The results indicate further that with increasing education and income levels, individuals are less likely to prefer domestically produced cheese for either economic or quality reasons. This effect is stronger for the quality preference.

 

 

Processing of mathematical operations and solving numerical tasks implicate a distributed set of brain regions. These regions include the superior and inferior parietal lobules that underlie numerical processing such as size judgments, and additional prefrontal regions that are needed for formal mathematical operations such as addition, subtraction and multiplication [Arsalidou, Taylor, 2011]. Critically, little is known about the connectivity between these regions and the association between math performance and the anatomical structure of white matter tracts. The present study investigates connectivity and white matter tracks associated with networks related to math performance: arcuate fasciculus (AF) and superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF). Participants performed a computerized task with mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) with three levels of difficulty; accuracy and reaction time were recorded. Diffusion tensor imagining (DTI) recordings provided indices on fractional anisotropy (FA) — a measure of the direction of white matter tracks in the brain. The relation between FA and math performance scores is reported.

This paper is an empirical study of the changing nature of the dependence of fundamental factors on the stock market index, which is the trend identified earlier in the Russian stock market. We empirically test the impact of daily values of fundamental factors on the MOEX Russia Index from 2003 to 2018. The analysis of the ARIMA-GARCH (1,1) model with a rolling window reveals that the change in the power and direction of the influence of the fundamental factors on the Russian stock market persists. The Quandt-Andrews breakpoint test and Bai-Perron test identify the number and likely location of structural breaks. We find multiple breaks probably associated with the dramatic falls of the stock market index. The results of the regression models over the different regimes, defined by the structural breaks, can vary markedly over time. This research is of value in macroeconomic forecasting and in the investment strategy development

This paper studies how the influence of the fundamental factors on the Russian stock market changes retrospectively. We empirically test the impact of daily values of fundamental factors (indexes of foreign stock markets, oil price, exchange rate and interest rates in Russia and the USA) on the MOEX Russia Index over long time interval from 2003 to 2018. The analysis of the ARIMA-GARCH (1,1) model with a rolling window reveals the changes in the power and direction of the influence of the fundamental factors which are probably caused by the structural instability revealed earlier in Russia and other stock markets. The Quandt-Andrews breakpoint test and Bai-Perron test identify the number and likely location of the structural breaks. We find multiple breaks probably associated with dramatic falls in the stock market index, for example with the significant falls of the then MICEX index in the spring of 2006 and the global financial crisis of 2008-2009. The results of the regression models over the different regimes, defined by the structural breaks, can vary markedly over time.

We investigate alcohol consumption as one of the main factors contributing to variation in the gender gap in life expectancy in the Russian regions. We consider the socioeconomic indicators and mortality coefficients that enable us to capture the causes of death related primarily to alcohol abuse and smoking. We assume that macroeconomic situation, coupled with alcohol consumption are substantial determinants of the gender gap in life expectancy in the Russian regions. A panel data analysis confirms that alcohol consumption has a significant influence on the gender gap in life expectancy and reduces the life expectancy of men first and foremost, as they are more inclined toward unhealthy behaviours. We have determined that employment and income support policies should be conducted in conjunction with the anti-alcohol policy. Social policy aimed at reducing alcohol consumption should be vigorously reinforced during an economic recovery.