The paper examines the impact of income inequality in Russian regions on the dynamics of the overall price level. In the framework of econometric modeling based on panel data of 82 Russian regions for 2011—2020, it was evidenced that higher inequality restrains inflation, while reducing inequality accelerates price growth. To overcome the problem of endogeneity, an approach based on instrumental variables is applied. It is shown that the result is robust to changes in inequality measures, estimation methods and instrumental variables. The potential channels of influence of income distribution inequality on inflation and the effectiveness of monetary policy explaining the effect are analyzed.

A significant and ever-growing body of papers revealing various aspects of financial development lead to polysemy regarding this concept. Fundamentally financial development is defined in this study as such alterations which help to reduce explicit and implicit costs related to the work of the financial system and providing its functions. Practically it is characterized by various configurations and scenarios depending on the place and time. Historically, we can see the transition from financial repression to financial liberalization, but the assessment of the consequences of financial liberalization remains ambiguous. Moreover, there are concerns that financialization, as a phenomenon of outpacing growth in the financial sector liabilities compared to the economy as a whole, will restrain incentives for financial development. However, financial innovation as another objectification of financial development can overcome the confines imposed by financialization. Financial innovations contribute more to increasing the financial inclusion and financial systems efficiency and to a lesser extent to financial deepening. In contemporary world financial development trends, driven by digitalization, lay the basis of the financial sector’s fundamental modernization. They will make it possible to overcome the imbalances that were previously associated with the concept of financialization, the weakening of the link between financial development and economic growth, and other structural issues.

How do Russian market participants react to the decisions of the Bank of Russia on changes to the Lombard List? This paper examines the relationship between the inclusion of securities in the list and changes in returns and volatility of shares in Moscow Stock Exchange companies. To model the behavior of the volatility of stocks of companies, modified HAR-models were used, to model returns — a market model; the study was carried out for 5-minute, hourly and daily time intervals. As a result, it was found that in the period from 2014 to 2020, the addition of a security to the Lombard List, which occurred faster than 3 weeks from the date of issue, led to a significant increase in returns of stocks of companies and to a significant decrease in their volatility and the effects might be observed during several hours. Thus, market participants perceive such news as significant signals about the state of affairs in private companies, despite the initial goal of the regulator. Based on the results of the analysis, recommendations were also formulated for the Bank of Russia to change the mechanism of including securities in the Lombard List.

Today, in the Russian scientific literature, the peculiarities of the development of industry firm dynamics remain understudied, especially from the standpoint of their potential effects on the firms effectiveness. This article evaluates the impact of the entry and exit of firms on financial results and performance indicators of dairy companies. It is proved that the entry and exit parameters of firms, along with the level of industrial concentration, are significant factors determining both the dynamics of gross profit of companies and the industry average rate of gross profit margin. Against the background of declining industry dynamics in 2017—2020, a slowdown of a number of indicators of innovative activity of dairy industry companies and an increase of their profitability indicators have been revealed. At the same time, the impact of industry dynamics on efficiency indicators is ambiguous: it is noticeable on labor productivity values, but no such impact is observed on the efficiency indicators of the use of fixed capital. The influence of the age of industrial companies on labor productivity and capital return has also been established, and the hypothesis of higher production efficiency of younger companies has been confirmed. It is necessary to stimulate the influx of young and innovative companies into the industrial sector, increase the number of new firms, reduce the impact of structural and strategic barriers to entry, and improve the conditions of entrepreneurship in the manufacturing sector of the Russian economy.

Nowadays there are two perspectives on the COVID-19 pandemic: it has become a threat to sustainable economic development and the pharmaceutical industry has turned out to be its main beneficiary. The purpose of this article is to empirically verify the correctness of these statements. The data sample consists of 1771 enterprises of Russian pharmaceutical industry over a 14-year period. The methods used consisted of positioning maps and pairwise comparison of the financial indicators for 2020 with the two most severe crises in the Russian economy (2009 and 2015), as well as with the period of the most sustainable development (2007) and the legacy year (2019). In order to assess the uniformity of the pandemic impact on the industry, we identified analytical groups based on the scale of enterprises and life cycle stages. The main result is to reveal the uneven pandemic impact on the sustainable development of pharmaceutical industry producers. Small young companies were the main beneficiaries of the pandemic. The micro-enterprises in the pharmaceutical industry were the most severely affected. However, the analysis has shown that the pandemic was not the main cause of their instability. In addition, the study as a whole proves the presence of a certain stress resistance of domestic pharmaceutical producers to crises of various nature.

The paper is devoted to the consequences of the choice among alternative procurement procedures in terms of cost and quality results of the complex projects implementation in the existing institutional environment of the Russian Federation. The empirical analysis, that was conducted on the procurement data in the field of metro construction within Federal law No. 223, showed that the auction’s form despite the higher indicators of the level of competition at the bidding loses its efficiency by price criterion with increasing contract complexity and demonstrates consistently lower relative savings rate compared to request for proposals in the case of procurement of design, construction, and repair works. Moreover, the auction is characterized by higher indicators of contract completion delays, which have a critical role in the implementation of infrastructure projects. The approaches proposed in the paper and obtained results may be useful in the formation of planning methods for a wide class of projects in terms of procurement activity organization.

The paper deals with the empirical evidence on household borrowing behavior from an institutionalist perspective. Assuming close interconnections between the availability of credit and consumerist culture, we estimate the effects of precedence of consumption, status consumption, and “investment”-minded buying driven by debt pattern. We rely on official statistics on household debt, disposable income and spending since the early 2000s to 2020. The institution of precedence of consumption is measured through data on loans drawn by households, outstanding loans, loan payments, household consumption and disposable income. Corresponding metrics illustrate that debt-financed consumption has become a widespread scheme. Financialization rate is measured separately for retail sector and housing market. Households are becoming more dependent on loan payments, as we estimated for different income groups using the paymentto-income ratios. In case with car loans, these metrics serve as indirect evidence for the embeddedness of conspicuous motive. Evidence on housing loans suggests that “investment”-minded buying can hardly result in a short-term gain. Research findings show that the pattern of precedence of consumption feeds the socially induced motives of conspicuous waste and speculation. Causality can go the other way too. The novelty of our approach is that we integrate the discourse of financialization into the institutionalist perspective and combine the theoretical constructs of precedence of consumption, conspicuous waste and speculative motive, seen as the factors of debt dependence. We contribute to applied studies by introducing factual data on household debt and providing evidence of interplay between these factors. The research is relevant socially and economically in view of the connection between unsustainable household debt and consumerist culture.