Finding a Civilisational Idea: “West,” Eurasia,” and “Euro-East” in Russia's Foreign Policy

Civilisations are imagined, ratherm than real, and nations undergoing identity crises typically represent themselves through multiple civilisational visions. Scholars of geopolitics can hardly understand foreign policy without analysing those visions and social contexts, in which they rise and fall. This article selects for analysis three distinct civilisational ideas of Russia – “West,” “Eurasia” and “Euro-East” – associated with Boris Yeltsin, Yevgeni Primakov and Vladimir Putin, respectively. Russia's foreign policy is best understood as reflecting those civilisational ideas rather than merely material power conditions.     

A simple search model of money with heterogeneous agents and partial acceptability

Summary. Simple search models have equilibria where some agents accept money and others do not. We argue such equilibria should not be taken seriously. This is unfortunate if one wants a model with partial acceptability. We introduce heterogeneous agents and show partial acceptability arises naturally and robustly. There can be multiple equilibria with different degrees of acceptability. Given the type of heterogeneity we allow, the model is simple: equilibria reduce to fixed points in [0,1]. We show that with other forms of heterogeneity equilibria are fixed points in set space, and there is no method to reduce this to a problem in R¹.Received: 4 September 2002, Revised: 23 September 2002JEL Classification Numbers: C78, E40.A. Shevchenko, R. Wright: We thank seminar participants at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Indiana University, Purdue University, University of Toronto, the 2002 Midwest Macroeconomics Conference at Vanderbilt University, and the 2001 Conference on Economic Dynamics at the University of Essex. The National Science Foundation and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland provided financial support. Braz Ministerio de Camargo and Gabriel Camera provided some helpful suggestions. Correspondence to: R. Wright     

Corporate Ownership Around the World

We use data on ownership structures of large corporations in 27 wealthy economies to identify the ultimate controlling shareholders of these firms. We find that, except in economies with very good shareholder protection, relatively few of these firms are widely held, in contrast to Berle and Means's image of ownership of the modern corporation. Rather, these firms are typically controlled by families or the State. Equity control by financial institutions is far less common. The controlling shareholders typically have power over firms significantly in excess of their cash flow rights, primarily through the use of pyramids and participation in management.     

Do Institutions Cause Growth?

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that (a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, (b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and (c) subsequently improve their political institutions.     

Growth in regions

We use a newly assembled sample of 1,528 regions from 83 countries to compare the speed of per capita income convergence within and across countries. Regional growth is shaped by similar factors as national growth, such as geography and human capital. Regional convergence rate is about 2 % per year, comparable to that between countries. Regional convergence is faster in richer countries, and countries with better capital markets. A calibration of a neoclassical growth model suggests that significant barriers to factor mobility within countries are needed to account for the evidence.     

A reference-dependent representation with subjective tastes

Experimental and empirical evidence documents instances where the presence of an inferior option in a menu increases the attractiveness of the better options from that menu and thus distorts the normative ranking across menus. We analyze the case when in addition to this so called context-effects bias there is also a concern for flexibility, in the spirit of the literature initiated by Kreps (1979) and Dekel et al. (2001). Since the context-effects bias and the desire for flexibility both increase the inclination of a decision maker to choose larger menus, our analysis allows the disentangling of the effect of the behavioral bias from the effect of the rational desire from flexibility. We find a weak condition on the set of ex post preferences under which the two effects are identifiable. We show that our representation is essentially unique. From a methodological viewpoint, our paper provides a novel technique of identifying probabilities on the state space of subjective uncertainty introduced by Dekel et al. (2001) when this state space is infinite. This method renders the infinite state space essentially finite with respect to a certain salient property.     

Exclusivity and Control

We model competition between content distributors (platforms) for content providers, and show that whether or not content is exclusive or “multihomes” depends crucially on whether or not content providers maintain control over their own pricing to consumers: if content providers sell their content outright and relinquish control, they will tend to be exclusive; on the other hand, if content providers maintain control and only “affiliate” with platforms, then multihoming is sustainable in equilibrium. We show that the outcome under affiliation depends on the tradeoff between platform rent extraction (which increases in exclusivity) and content rent extraction (which increases in multihoming), and demonstrate that the propensity for exclusivity can be increasing, decreasing, or even nonmonotonic in content quality. Finally, if a content provider internalizes the effect of its own price on platform demand, we prove that a platform that already has exclusive access to content may prefer to relinquish control over content pricing to the content provider in order to reduce price competition at the platform level.     

Security design,market risk and round quotes in the treasury bond market

Prior literature finds that the tendency of price-endings to cluster on rounder fractions increases with price volatility. We estimate the separate influences and relative importance of the determinants of price volatility, security design and market risks. Our data is from a market setting that is ideal for isolating and studying the relations of interest. Results for both quote and trade prices indicate that the tendency to use round price-endings increases with both a security’s inherent risk, attributable to security design, and variation over time in market risks. Security design influences clustering more than market risks, but market risks are influential in determining clustering once security design is fixed. The estimated effects are strongest in the on-the-run market segment where liquidity facilitates the aggregation of information into price.     

Dynamically stable preferences

In the framework of dynamic choice under uncertainty, we define dynamic stability as a combination of two assumptions prevalent in the literature: dynamic consistency and the requirement that updated preferences have the same “structure” as ex ante ones. Dynamic stability also turns out to be a defining characteristic of the multiplier preferences of Hansen and Sargent (2001) [24] within the scope of variational preferences. Generally, for any class of invariant preferences, dynamic stability is shown to be connected to another independent property — consequentialism.