Investors are being encouraged after the global crisis to reduce their dependence on the largest credit rating agencies for risk assessments of companies and securities. Comparing risk assessments from different sources rapidly becomes non-trivial when more than three credit rating agencies are...

Under the Basel II accord, improving probability of default models is a key risk-management priority. There are four main aspects of this research: suggesting the bank default classification; using a wide time horizon (quarterly Russian banking statistics from 1998 to 2011); investigating the...

The 'informal' sector of an economy is generally seen as a private sphere, where agents seek to escape the reach of the state and, in particular, the tax organs. However, given the weakness of the Russian state and the enormous scale of informal economic activity, the fiscal authorities try to...