The Marginalist Revolution, which is traditionally associated with the date 1871 and the names of Leon Walras, William Stanley Jevons, Karl Menger, is interpreted as a complex and lengthy process, that ended around the mid-twentieth century. Its origins can be traced to three relatively independent trends that existed long before the 1870s: in the field of value theory — a tendency to view utility as a basis of value, in the field of methodology — a trend towards the adoption of deductive method, in the field of analytical tools — a trend towards the application of mathematics in economics. The achievements of these authors, which in a sense can be regarded as a “point of intersection” (“overlap”) of the above-mentioned tendencies, were not properly appreciated by contemporaries, were not considered as revolutionary and for quite a long time remained on the periphery of economic research, became a bridge to the future economic science.

The article considers: (a) the main features of the development of economic history (EH) as an academic discipline in the second half of the 20th century; key challenges faced by the EH in the early 2020s. Based on the results of the survey of 147 international economic historians author reveals the most popular methods used by scholars from different local research communities. Special attention is paid to the study of respondents’ perception of the place of EH among other sciences. The analysis has shown that nowadays EH is gradually becoming an interdisciplinary research platform connecting scholars from a wide variety of subject At the same time, these scholars are united not as much by the unity of conceptual views, as by the desire to study EH not for the sake of history per se, but for the sake of finding the origins of modern social and economic challenges. The article also contains the results of a survey of 42 Russian economic historians about the theoretical and methodological assumptions they use and their vision of the problems of studying economic history in today’s Russia. The analysis has revealed that one of the main challenges for the development of the Russian community of economic historians is its high fragmentation, manifested in the lack of methodological consensus, as well as a rather pessimistic vision of future prospects of EH.

This article uses the records of archival monastic account books to answer a number of questions about trade relations between Russia and the eastern countries at the second half of the 17th and early 18th century. In particular, for some oriental goods, we can talk about the predominance of the import from Europe. Although contemporaries believed that Russia had an advantageous position for the Eurasian transit of oriental goods. The article also presents a newly constructed time series of prices for pepper. The data allow us to affirm that a “price revolution” was not taking place on the Russian spice market. In addition, the study shows that monasteries were one of the key consumers of oriental goods. The monastic books make it possible to describe the use of petroleum and other oriental goods in Russia.

This paper analyzes optimal privatization policy in exhaustible resource industry where a public domestic firm is less cost efficient than a private multinational firm. It is shown that the impact of foreign penetration on optimal privatization depends on the cost asymmetry between the public and private firm. If the cost efficiency gap is small, then the optimal rate of privatization is a decreasing function of foreign ownership of multinational firm. However, if the cost efficiency gap is large, then, contrasting to existing studies, the result is quite different: full nationalization is optimal if the foreign ownership of multinational firm is low but full privatization becomes optimal if this share is high. Under moderate cost asymmetry foreign penetration does not have any impact on privatization. It is also demonstrated that an increase in foreign penetration results in faster resource extraction by the public firm while an increase in the state share accelerates public firm extraction if it was initially too slow in comparison with the socially efficient path and slows down if it was initially too fast.

This paper discovers the sustainability of agglomeration externalities and robustness issues for Russian private real sector companies between 2011 to 2018. Agglomeration effects are measured with the Ellison—Glaeser index (industry is supposed to be clustered in certain region(s) if the EG value is high). Firms’ sales margin was chosen as the main performance characteristic (dependent variable). The sample was divided into six aggregated groups (agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transport, IT, services). For each of them, sustainability and robustness of the concentration effect were checked using OLS estimates obtained for each year. Companies, located in and out of the cluster were studied separately. Strong, sustainable, and positive concentration effects were found for the agricultural, mining and transport industries. Sustainable negative agglomeration effects appear for the manufacturing and service industries. For IT companies located inside the industry cluster the agglomeration effect appeared to be negative and for those outside it — positive.

The article presents the results of an academic reputation survey of Russian economists (N = 6392). The resulting ranking is then compared with their scientometric indicators provided by the Russian Science Citation Index (citations in eLibrary and in RSCI core), as well as calculated by the authors (citations in the RSCI list of distinguished journals). The analysis demonstrates that a robust hierarchy of academic authority exists in Russia, which is, however, only moderately correlated with scientometric indicators. We can classify discrepancies into type I errors (researchers with high citation rates are not enjoying recognition by peers) and type II errors (recognized researchers have poor scientometric records). Type I errors mostly result from (1) misidentification of authors; (2) non-fractionalized authorship of collected volumes; (3) instrumental citing; (4) gaming the metrics. Type II errors arise from ambiguity of the disciplinary boundaries of economics and boundaries of national science, as well as from the ambiguous status of public intellectuals addressing economic issues and politicians responsible for economic policy. Overall, type II errors are less dramatic: it is hard for Russian economists to be widely influential, but little cited. Type I errors are much more widespread. Indicators based on the RSCI list of distinguished journals give the most accurate estimates.

An increasing attention has been riveted recently on so called ESGfactors impacting financial stability. This paper provides a systematic review of the empirical studies which assess the impact of environmental (climatic), social factors as well as various aspects related to corporate governance on financial stability. Overall, higher ESG-rankings, both aggregate and in terms of the three pillars (E, S, G), tend to enhance the financial system stability from the microand macroprudential perspective by mitigating aggregate individual risk of financial institutions and the contribution to systemic risk, respectively. Nonetheless, the research intensity within the ESG pillars differs substantially. There are significantly more studies investigating the impact of environmental and corporate governance factors then tackling the effects of social ones. This literature review is closed with the discussion of possible directions for future investigation in the given research program.

The article considers a microeconomic analysis of the main options for decomposing the value index into price and quantity change factors, as a result of which it becomes possible to interpret these options in terms of changing the expectations of either the consumer or the producer. The purpose of the study is to show that the Laspeyres, Paasche and Fisher indices have not only an estimated, but also an important content function, reflecting changes in the market expectations of economic agents. To achieve the goal, a comparative analysis of the basic formulas of the concepts of adaptive and rational expectations was carried out, as well as a meaningful analysis of the cost aggregates that are components of the Laspeyres, Paasche and Fisher indices, and a schematic diagram of the formation of adaptive and rational expectations was developed. As a methodological basis for solving the problem, the expectation theory, the analogy method, the index method of factor reversibility, and the minimum basis method were used. It is shown that Laspeyres indices are the essence of changes in adaptive expectations, Paasche indices are changes in rational expectations of producers and consumers, and Fisher indices are a joint change in adaptive and rational expectations of economic agents. It is advisable to interpret one of the main methods of decomposition of the cost index into factors as a “buying” method that meets the expectations of the consumer, another — as a “selling” method that meets the expectations of the manufacturer, a decomposition method, the third — as a “compromise” between market expectations of economic agents.