The purpose of this work is to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of banking system in Russia, and to understand its core dependencies and potential risks. The system, the way we find it now, has evolved though difficult transition from highly centralized and planned Soviet economy to...

Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

Individuals are involved in daily decision making situations under varying levels of certainty and ease of gathering information, characterized by many factors such as the need to make payments, or the desire to fulfill goals. Essay 1 proposes that when individuals are faced with environments...

One of the keys to building a solid economy is the existence of a long term debt market. Long term borrowing is crucial for personal home ownership, the creation of critical infrastructure, and the development of major real estate projects. Most emerging market economies do not have a long term...

The idea that massive natural resource endowments would lead countries to weak economic growth and development is counterintuitive. Oil, gas, copper, gold or other resource riches should, at least in theory, spearhead countries with such natural wealth to growth that parallels...

Essay 1: Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with recommendations about products and services. These recommendations are usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It...

The world-wide consolidation in the electronic trading industry has provided evidence that small exchanges and trading portals need to deliver more than sophisticated technology, streaming quotes and market data. In order to deliver value and survive, they need to provide liquidity. Noteworthy...

Do financial crises tend to arise together? Recent financial crisis that has originated from credit crisis in US in 2008 spread throughout countries ranging from Asia, to Europe, to Africa. Generally a shock to one country's asset market that causes changes in asset prices in another country's...