Russia's Performance Research Articles

Reclaiming the margins: collective resistance and feminist artistic practices in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT In this provocation, I grapple with questions concerning the legacy and impact of radical feminist performance in Russia’s repressive political climate and the possibility of collective resistance through performance. I address the devastating effects of the increasingly totalitarian regime on the work of radical feminist performers such as Pussy Riot, Darya Apakhonchich, and Katrin Nenasheva. The likelihood of surviving as a politically engaged performer-activist – as an outsider inside Russia – has been completely obliterated by the Kremlin but solidarity and collective resistance within and across national borders generate the sites of possibility to dream, imagine, and create together which, as Sara Ahmed (2014 [2004]: 181) reminds us, ‘energises the hope of transformation.’ In tracing the trajectory of precarity and hope in Russia’s current feminist artistic practices rooted in collective resistance, I employ the politics of relation as a framework that places the bodies of performers in relation to ‘others to whom [they] belong as inseparable, not separate’ thus creating ‘affective ties’ with others (Aimee Carrillo Rowe 2005, 27). This is an expanded version of a provocation prepared for the ‘Collective Resistance’ roundtable at the Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance conference at De Montfort University in 2022.

Innovations and their complementarities: which types of innovations drive export performance?

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the impacts of different innovation types and personnel training on manufacturing firms’ export performance in Russia. We use Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey data and modified Crépon-Duguet-Mairesse (CDM) model, linking firms’ R&D, innovation (product, process, organisational, and marketing), and export share in revenue to fill the research gap by connecting innovation with export and addressing different innovation types. Estimation reveals that combination of organisational innovations with other innovations increases return on R&D and export; firms performing R&D are more sensitive to taxes and difficulties in receiving licences and permits, while cooperation and training facilitate process, marketing, and organisational innovations, and all innovation types positively affect firms’ export. Therefore, on firm level, personnel training and combining different innovation types will enhance export. At the regional or national level, we offer approaches for improving policy to support developing human capital, providing better business environment, and promoting fair competition.

Race for Immunity: the Russian Stock Market during the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT This paper evaluates the stock market performance in Russia during the COVID-19 pandemic from January 3, 2020, to April 30, 2021. The study shows daily abnormal returns of stocks declined on the day when the first coronavirus case was detected. The government’s actions in implementing lockdown restrictions and providing stimulus packages positively influenced the stock market. However, the early lifting of lockdowns sent a negative signal to investors. Despite the skepticism among the population toward the first coronavirus vaccine Sputnik V, the news of its registration, mass vaccination, and Russia’s “vaccine diplomacy” contributed to the stock market’s growth.

Assessment of SMAP and AMSR2 freeze/thaw products over Russia using in situ measurements

ABSTRACT Recently, many freeze/thaw (FT) products have been developed using spaceborne microwave measurements. In this letter, we compared the newest FT products, SMAP36 (36 km resolution) and SMAP09 (9 km resolution) provided by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission and one product, AMSR2 FT, generated by the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) against surface soil temperature measurements across Russia using a total of 494 stations. The results indicate that AMSR2 FT has a better performance in Russia than the SMAP products, which is more pronounced in the AM (descending orbit) value of overall accuracy (OA) than in the PM (ascending orbit). It is challenging to distinguish FT states in the transition periods between warm and cold seasons, but AMSR2 FT performs better than SMAP products. AMSR2 FT has a high OA in inland areas but a low OA along coastal zones because pixels may contain a water body or lake ice. The poorest SMAP results are mainly distributed in mixed forest areas, indicating that the algorithm should be improved to solve the wet snow problem in these areas. The results of this study could help improve FT products in Russia and provide application instructions for FT product users.

The Impact of Foreign Sanctions on Firm Performance in Russia

The Impact of Foreign Sanctions on Firm Performance in Russia

Satirical strikes and deadpanning diplomats: Stiob as geopolitical performance in Russia–US relations

AbstractThis article examines humor as geopolitical performance in the context of Russia–US political communication. Humor has featured prominently in the mass‐mediated performances of Russian state actors since 2012. Public officials such as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have engaged in ambiguous play and satirical borrowings via the circulation of memes and other political theatrics. “Russiagate”—the scandal about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election—proved to be a particular flashpoint. I draw on recent scholarship in anthropology and media studies as well as prior ethnographic work to account for these humorous performances and consider the work that they do. Dominant analyses view this humor in militarized terms, regarding it as part of a deliberate “hybrid war” strategy. I contend that deadpanning diplomats like Lavrov are produced when a transformed Soviet‐era humorous form, stiob, intersects with a hybridized and transnationally dialogic global media context, resulting in a volatile form of geopolitical communication. In taking this state propagated humor and the confusion it generates as ethnographic objects, I contribute to anthropological interrogations of the politics of post‐truth.

Rule with an iron hand: powerful CEOs, influential shareholders and corporate performance in Russia

PurposeThis study examines whether CEO power influences the book-based and market-based performance of Russian companies when it is restricted by the presence of essential shareholders, namely, state and influential businessmen.Design/methodology/approachManagerial power is divided into structural, ownership, expert and prestige. The proposed power metrics include not only CEOs but also the board of directors' characteristics that may restrict or enhance CEO power. The empirical analysis is based on the sample of 90 large traded Russian firms, which shares are included in the Moscow Stock Exchange Broad Market Index (MICEX BMI), observed from 2012 to 2019.FindingsPanel data analysis suggests that higher board ownership and tenure may restrict CEO power, which in turn would be beneficial for corporate performance. the authors also see that in companies owned by influential businessmen, CEO power influence on M/B value is more negative, while state ownership does not moderate it. CEO power metrics, based on political experience and tenure, affect corporate performance differently in companies affiliated with extractive industries.Originality/valueFirst, the authors consider two channels through which a company in emerging markets may get additional resources: CEOs and influential owners. Second, the authors develop power metrics based on Finkelstein's managerial power classification (1992) and the idea of relative power proposed by Bebchuk et al. (2011). It allows identifying whether the board of directors' may constrain or enhance CEO power to raise corporate performance. Third, the authors analyze developing Russian markets that represent a good ground for testing the question, whereas empirical research on Russia is relatively scarce (Grosman and Leiponen, 2018). Fourth, the authors pay particular attention to the CEO power in the extractive industry, strategically important for the Russian economy.

Political Performance in Russia: Carnival Polyphony

The political reality is becoming more and more virtual. The government retains control over the political space. At the same time, the political practices themselves are becoming more approximate. The spectacle nature of politics is increasingly making itself felt. Politics is perceived as a game, a show, a theater, with its own genre of laws and stylistics. This view of politics is increasingly gaining ground in the context of COVID-19, which divides social ties and organizes society in an online reality. In full measure, these challenges are relevant for modern Russia. Similar problems are beginning to arise in Russian regions as well. In this article, the author highlights the carnival element of contemporary Russian politics. The author’s goal is to establish a relationship between the polyphony of carnival reality, which is often not in the control of the authorities, and the practices of legitimation of the authorities themselves, which constantly need approval and recognition of their own policies. The purpose of the study was to clarify the association between the carnival element of politics in Russia and the legitimation of power. The research methodology was the author’s deconstruction of the political process in Russia using a formal method (M. Bakhtin’s theory) that allowed one to see in it the constant constitution of new forms of social activity. As a result of the research, the author concluded that political processes in Russia can be defined in a carnival form, within which various voices and ideas can independently be present. The polyphony of politics, in fact, resembles the polyphony of the carnival itself. The polyphony achieved in the carnival, and in creating a deceptive sense of democracy, creates a whole host of challenges and risks for the authorities. Creative energy and destructive energy are present with each other at the same time. That is why, for the authorities, such a release is always mysterious and indefinite. Loss of form is always dangerous for the authorities, who are accustomed to extreme clarity and determination of possible consequences.
 Keywords: carnival, legitimation, political performance, power, polyphony

Evidence of Sustained Russian Corporate Growth despite International Liquidity and Trade Shocks

ABSTRACT This paper employs an institutional perspective as part of our approach to measure long-run performance of Russia’s largest firms. Our dataset is based on financial information on Russia’s fifty largest and most prominent firms, from 1998 to 2016. Our results indicate that such firms benefited from long-term government lending, particularly in the aftermath of financial and terms-of-trade crises. While recognizing the important role played by Russia’s Stabilization Fund, we argue that Russia efficaciously adapted its institutional framework to ensure that Stabilization funds maintained industrial and economic stability.

Support of State and Private Institutions for Biomedical Start-ups in Russia

This paper describes the differences between biomedical start-ups with state support and start-ups with support provided by private market participants in Russia as a country with limited private investments. Based on the sample of Skolkovo biomedical start-ups, we analyse ownership and management characteristics of start-ups as well as the performance of companies supported by these two types of institutions.
 To compare start-ups supported from different sources, the sample of biomedical companies is divided into four clusters based on the presence of state and/or private support. The results of cluster characterization indicate that start-ups with different types of support vary significantly in ownership concentration, share of managerial ownership, gender diversity and CEO experience.Although tests for differences among the groups’ mean values showed the insignificance of performance variation among clusters, start-ups with private funding in the sample were mostly smaller-sized companies with fewer patentsand employees. At the same time, start-ups that were supported from both private and state sources performed better on average in the number of employees and patents and the presence of revenue. Although the causal relationship between the type of support and start-up performance is not investigated in this paper, our results suggest the importance of the synergy of state and private support for biomedical start-up performance in Russia.
 Besides contributing to the literature on start-up support in emerging markets, this paper is, as far as we know, one of the first academic studies to provide insights into the market of Russian biotech start-ups.

Is Vladimir Putin a strong leader?

ABSTRACT A strong leader – i.e. an individual who concentrates great power in his hands and uses it to solve the country’s problems – is often considered a good thing in contemporary politics. Vladimir Putin has always presented himself as precisely this kind of leader. This article considers whether Putin actually is a strong leader who has used his powers to do great things for Russia. The analysis begins by considering whether Putin is a strong leader in terms of the powers that he holds. It then assesses whether Putin has used these powers to solve Russia’s problems in terms of economic development, order, and national standing. Russia here is compared to the other states of the Former Soviet Union, as they all share a common Soviet heritage and have been subject to comparable structural forces. The study utilizes the data (arguably underused in the field) provided by institutions such as the World Bank to examine a large number of socio-economic factors. If Putin really is a strong leader who has transformed Russia, we would expect performance in Russia to be better than in these other countries. The article finds that Russia’s record is average at best and that Putin is an unexceptional leader.

Sustainable Development: Bonding Inertia of a Resource Based Economic Specialization

This article is focused on the issues of interdependence between resources and economic development. The inability to form universal approaches to ensuring sustainable development is caused by constant change of public development conditions and substantial differences between territories. The objective of this research is to reveal distinctive tendencies in the performance of Russia’s economic system in view of exploring possibilities of achieving sustainable development in regions with a large number of monotowns. The hypothesis of the research is a thesis that sustainable development of the Russian economy at all levels is affected by the growth holding inertia caused by its resource based specialization. It was confirmed that among factors affecting sustainable development of the Russian economy are its specialization in natural resources, fragmented material production, lack of a national science-based engineering core and a non-developed internal market, priority support by the government of large private companies both in industry and finance and reliance on foreign investments. The analysis of sustainable development of Kemerovo Oblast confirmed the first part of the conclusions made by Thanh Le and Cuong Le Van – the use of nonrenewable resources limits economic growth. It is currently impossible to verify the second part of their conclusions as applied to Kemerovo Oblast. The main condition – rational economic structure – is out of the picture. The process of sustainable development is affected by dominating resource based industrial specialization and as a result by high dependence of socio-economic development and regional budgets on world commodity prices.

Autocratic governors in public procurement

The personal role of sub-national rulers is crucial for regional development in countries with weak institutions. This paper studies the impact of regional governors’ tenure in office and their local ties on procurement performance in Russia. To identify the causal effect, we construct instruments for governor’s tenure by exploiting the regional vote share of ruling party in past parliament elections. We find the evidence that governors who do not have pre-governing local ties in the region (outsiders) demonstrate predatory behaviour, compared to governors with local ties (insiders). Namely, governors-outsiders restrict the competition at awarding stage significantly more than governors-insiders. Moreover, for governors-outsiders this restriction becomes stronger with tenure in office, while governors-insiders do not demonstrate such negative tenure effect. We argue that this restriction of competition by governors-outsiders cannot be explained by the intention of better contracts execution: the delays in execution and the probability of contract termination either increase or keep stable with tenure for governors-outsiders and these outcomes decrease with tenure for governors-insiders.

Assessing the performance of Russia's State-partnered banking institutions and major private banks using the DEA method

Assessing the performance of Russia's State-partnered banking institutions and major private banks using the DEA method

Top Management Compensation and Performance in Russian Companies

Konstantin V. Bogatyrev - Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University. 
 E-mail: konstantin.bogatyrev@yahoo.com
 The top management remuneration policy of public companies counts among the key decisions that shape the financial architecture and the incentive structure for hired executives in such companies. The factors determining the pay of top managers have been a debated topic both for academia and for the public at large for decades. For Russian companies, however, this question has remained largely unstudied.This paper is intended to rectify this deficiency and contributes to the research on top management remuneration policy and the way in which it relates to performance in Russian corporations. Following an overview of the evidence presented in previous studies focusing on other markets, the paper presents a new empirical study of pay and performance using self-collected data on 93 Russian public companies for the five-year period between 2009 and 2013. The data on key management personnel compensation has been collected from the companies' official reports, including annual or financial reports and other stock exchange reports. The data on other financial indicators has been procured from the Bloomberg Professional® database.Using fixed effect models for econometric analysis, we find evidence of a positive relationship between compensation and business performance in Russia, although this is not evident for every performance indicator. Indeed, both short-term and long-term forms of compensation as well as their sum show a positive relationship to return on assets (ROA), and the respective sensitivities of pay to performance are not negligible. However, institutional or state ownership can weaken this sensitivity. The relationship is only evident in companies with no state participation. Whereas 33 state-owned companies in the sample exhibit no significant relationship of top management compensation to corporate performance, the accounting profits and ROA of the remaining 60 (private) companies serve as significant determinants of remuneration levels.

Economic conditions of coal industry performance in Russia

Economic conditions of coal industry performance in Russia

Modeling the Employment Rate in Russia: a Spatial-Econometric Approach

The purpose of this study is to identify factors that affect the level of employment in Russian regions. However, Russia is not a homogeneous country, and this effect may not be the same for all regions. That is why we split the regions of Russia into three groups, depending on the state of the labor market in this and neighboring regions. The HH (high-high) group comprises regions with a favorable situation in their labor markets, and which are also surrounded mostly by prosperous regions. Two groups of regions with a less favorable situation are located respectively in the south of Russia (LL1, low-low group 1) and southern Siberia and Zabaikalye (LL2, low-low group 2). We considered the twelve-year period from 2005 to 2016. As explanatory variables, we used variables for the attractiveness of the region, demographic characteristics of the region, and the degree of diversity of employees by economic activities. We tested hypotheses about differences in 1) the spatial effects and 2) the impact of the various explanatory variables for these groups of variables. To test our main hypotheses, we used spatial regression dynamic models estimated with the help of the generalized method of moments. Both main hypotheses received empirical confirmation. Spatial effects were different. The regions of the LL2 group are not affected by the situation in other local markets; regions of LL1 and HH groups are affected by the rest of Russia’s regions, and the extent of this influence decreases with the increase in geographical distance between regions. Moreover, the regions of the LL1 group compete with neighboring regions: if the situation in one of them improves, then it draws on the resources of the others. Regarding the impact of the explanatory variables, the “group effect†was revealed for the variables: share of urban population, net migration rate, shares of people below and above working age, share of people with higher education. Our results can favor the better design of national and regional policies to improve labor market performance in Russia based on the heterogeneity of the Russian regions.

The Effects of Collaboration on Research Performance of Universities: an Analysis by Federal District and Scientific Fields in Russia

The objective of our paper is to explore the extent to which the research collaborations could be an impact on the scientific performance of academic institutions. The analysis is based on data for 241 universities in Russia for 2015–2016 obtained from different sources: Interfax (privately held independent major news agency in Russia) National Ranking of Universities, monitoring of efficiency of activity of educational organizations of higher education (launched by Information-Computing Centre of Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation), and Russian Science Citation Index (largest Russian information and analytical portal in science, technology, medicine, and education and electronic library of scientific publications with 28 mlns of documents). We consider the number of citations of publications to evaluate university performance in Russia. To this end, we develop a non-overlapping generation model to evidence the theoretical idea of research externalities between academic institutions. Moreover, we implement different empirical models to test for the effect of external scientific collaborations on the institutional research quality by Federal District and scientific field. The results confirm an important positive impact of co-authoring process.

Paradoxes of inflation targeting and the determinants of price performance in Russia and the world

Paradoxes of inflation targeting and the determinants of price performance in Russia and the world

Talent Development and Its Role in Shaping Absorptive Capacity in Emerging Market Firms: The Case of Russia

The Problem The overall ability to create and transfer knowledge is one of the main competitive advantages for companies from emerging economies and becomes their performance driver. As human resource development (HRD) and talent development (TD), in particular, aim to extend employees’ capabilities related to innovative thinking, creativity, and their key competences, which can be necessary for knowledge creation and development, TD can be associated with a firm’s absorptive capacity; however, their relationship remains underresearched. Although some studies claim about grounds for absorptive capacity, lack of analysis of absorptive capacity dimensions, specified as knowledge acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation, and its connection to TD in the emerging market context can be observed especially with the relationship to firm performance in Russia. The Solution We investigate the influence of TD on firm’s absorptive capacity in emerging market contexts, more specifically in Russia, and confirm the link between TD in Russia and knowledge assimilation, knowledge transformation, knowledge exploitation, and knowledge acquisition. The Stakeholders We show the new perspective of talent management, in general, and TD, in particular, for HRD area, showing the leading role of TD in emerging market contexts that should be in a primary agenda for both researchers and practitioners.