The article considers the place of oil in the energy balance of developed and developing countries during the shocks associated with the technological progress, business cycles, climate policy trends, the pandemic of 2020, and the sanctions of 2022. The results reveal the stability of the demand for motor fuel in the post-pandemic recovery as well as the improvement of the position of oil companies. The study examines the multidirectional impact of climate policies: reducing oil demand and discouraging investment in oil production. In addition, our research considers sanctions and a partial oil embargo as a kind of forced industrial policy leading to the reorganization of the world’s oil production, delivery, and consumption systems, as well as the uncertainty in investment and an increase in energy prices. The stability of the demand for motor fuel in the post-pandemic recovery and the improvement of the position of oil companies are shown. The duality of the influence of the climate policy is considered: the reduction of relative oil demand, as well as the deterrence of investment in oil production. For a mature industry that provides high returns to investors, this means a normal change in the investment function from expanding capacity to increasing payments and market capitalization. The goal-setting conflict between energy security and the preservation of the planet’s climate is deepening. The fundamental question: how much government policy can change the natural processes of transformation, how quickly and at what cost, remains unresolved. Energy is proving to be one of the key touchstones for the ability of the world’s elites to coordinate on issues of sustainable development of the world economy and the preservation of the planet’s climate.

The role of uncertainty as one of the key channels for transmission of shocks, such as financial shocks in 2008—2009, pandemic in 2020—2022, or sanctions, is regularly highlighted by experts and international organizations. How to measure uncertainty and its effects in practice? Indicators based on financial variables, text analysis of media publications, variance in expert forecasts or firms’ expectations have been traditionally used for these purposes. This paper uses an alternative approach for the Russian case. Uncertainty is estimated as “unforecastibility” of future economic dynamics, that is, as a weighted average of standard deviations of forecast errors for the wide range of macroeconomic and macrofinancial variables. The forecasts are constructed through a factor model based on “big data”. The estimated uncertainty indicators for 1, 3 and 12 months ahead show stronger persistence and countercyclicality compared to alternative indicators. Significant impact of uncertainty shocks on output and CPI is demonstrated, underscoring the need for analysis of mutual impact of uncertainty and effectiveness of countercyclical economic policies.

In the article we systematize foreign experience in building dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models (DSGE) with heterogeneous economic agents. The advantages of models of this class relative to simpler specifications are analyzed while studying a few fundamental topics: starting with the reaction of aggregates in models where agents face idiosyncratic income risk, monetary and fiscal policies, and ending with models with entrepreneurship, the problem of the zero lower bound, and models of the social security system. Models with heterogeneous economic agents often give a radically different look at many well studied things in simpler models. They allow more accurate reproduction of empirical data and relationships, for example cross-sectional distributions of income and wealth. Therefore, it is very promising to study these models.

For a long time, innovation studies mainly focused on the macrolevel, i.e. country- or industry-level analysis of the innovation process. Nevertheless, throughout the last decade, there has been a methodological bias towards the study of the innovation process at the micro- or grassroots-level, i.e. at the level of social groups and employees who initiate and implement innovations within their organizations. This study is conducted in the grassroots-level framework. The focus is made both on the individual-level characteristics of employees who suggest innovative ideas, and on the organization-level factors that can affect employees’ involvement in the innovation process. Unlike similar studies, current research is focused not on high-skilled employees who are responsible for the innovation generation and implementation by their job duties, but rather on ordinary employees who voluntarily propose new ideas (“volunteer innovators”). Data from the Monitoring of Innovative Behavior of the Population by the Higher School of Economics for 2018 is used for the analysis. The results confirm low innovative activity of Russian enterprises as only 7% of the 4821 surveyed Russian employees aged from 18 to 65 offered innovative ideas. However, more than half of them (4%) were “volunteer innovators”. By using a binary logistic regression, a set of individual-level characteristics of “volunteer innovators” and organization-level factors that can promote volunteer innovative activity is outlined. The results of the study can be used by organizations to promote changes aimed at increasing innovative activity.

Intellectual property is often referred to as a “legal monopoly”, which should stimulate the innovative activity of authors and inventors. In this formulation, increased antitrust regulation should always have a negative effect on the innovation industry, since it is aimed at reducing the companies’ profits, and therefore, other things being equal, reducing the innovation incentives. The paper reveals the conditions under which this statement can be true, and under which, on the contrary, the strengthening of antimonopoly regulation leads to an increase in innovative output. Using cross-country data, an empirical assessment of the mutual influence of the effectiveness of antimonopoly regulation and the degree of protection of intellectual property rights on the efficiency of the innovation sector and the economy are obtained. As an indicator of relative efficiency the paper considers the proximity to the production possibilities frontier, determined by the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) method. As a result, the hypothesis for the complementary nature of the influence of both policies is confirmed: the strengthening of one gives a positive result only when the other is strong. The complementary nature of policies can be related to the following aspects. In the context of weak IP right protection, right holders are extensively using alternative mechanisms for the specification of property rights, which includes business practices that are controversial from the antitrust point of view. In such a case, strengthening the severity of antimonopoly regulation increases the costs of such practices and ultimately reduces the effectiveness of the intellectual property protection reducing output in the innovation industry. This result justifies the existence of exceptions for the IP owners, which could be present in the antimonopoly legislation in countries with a low level of IP rights protection. But as the effectiveness of the IP rights protection becomes stronger, such exceptions can be canceled. This result also shows that the notion of IP as a “legal monopoly” is overly simplistic and can lead to risks of Type I enforcement errors (punishing the innocent).

The article aims to identify the role of individual territories in the formation of gross and net tax revenues to the federal budget. The peculiarity of the approach will allow, to a certain extent, to assess the nature of spatial (horizontal) redistribution of the federal part of tax transfers administered by the Federal Tax Service. During 2006—2020, the values of net revenues to the federal budget turned out to be negative only in the North Caucasian and Far Eastern districts. In the context of the proposed approach, they are recipients of the federal budget; some of the federal support is, under certain assumptions, financed by tax revenues from other territories. As a rule, 40—50% of all subjects of the Russian Federation have negative net revenues. However, in most cases their values are insignificant, sometimes changing sign. The number of recipients of the federal budget, indicating a change in government priorities in the distribution of tax resources along the budget vertical, consistently increased until the crisis of 2008—2009 and decreased after it (with the exception of 2018—2020).

The article examines the development of the tourist potential of Russian territories as a complex of tourist resources that ensure the formation and satisfaction of the needs of potential tourists. The key research method was a survey of heads of municipalities of the Russian Federation. The study has revealed a contradiction between the confidence of municipal leaders in the presence of the tourist potential on their territory and the lack of basic tourist resources in detailed assessments. In the regional context, most territories show a lack of financial resources, private investment, support from sponsors and patrons. At the same time, the authorities identify the problems of the formation of tourist potential in the population’s behavior patterns: the lack of entrepreneurial activity and low effective demand for domestic tourist products. The results of the study show the presence of a stable correlation relationship between the support of government initiatives on the part of the local community and the availability of resources for the government to develop the tourist attractiveness of Russian territories.

The paper is prefaced by the statement that a paternalistic state was not invented by anyone and is a result of an endogenous process of society development, at different phases of which the state can generate both positive and negative consequences. In this context, the paper justifies the fallacy of the state’s decision to reorganize the Russian Academy of Sciences by escalating bureaucratic interference in scientific life — using scientometric management methods and introducing an “effective contract” that brought forth a “waterfall” of worthless articles and predatory journals. In order to eliminate “scientometric failure” the paper proposes recommendations on science reforming based on principally new view on the processes of knowledge production as a public good and its transformation into market products with an emphasis on one of the branches of this transformation — scientific articles publication. The theoretical result has served as a platform for the development of institutional modernization of the knowledge distribution system, according to which the authors for an appropriate fee may grant the right to use their scientific texts for publication in journals. The revenues of journals should come from two sources: the sale of journals at market prices consistent with the individual utility of publishing products, and a budget subsidy consistent with the social utility of journals’ knowledge dissemination services. The implementation of this reform implies state funding of scientific journals and targeted subsidies to scientific libraries of universities and academic institutions to pay for subscriptions to major scientific journals.