Alexandre Repkine

Turkmenistan: economic autocracy and recent growth performance

This book brings together ten original studies on the transition and growth experience and the foundations for long-term growth of the newly independent states created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

ICT Penetration and Aggregate Production Efficiency: Empirical Evidence for a Cross-Section of Fifty Countries

This study investigates the impact of telecommunications penetration on the aggregate production efficiency in a large cross-section of fifty countries. We show that higher levels of ICT capital stock penetration increase technical efficiency levels in the aggregate production function. However, depending on the geographical location the effects of ICT penetration are different. Our empirical findings suggest that increasing the per capita telecommunications capital in the form of land line and mobile telephones, computers, Internet access and the like is likely to considerably increase productive efficiency in case of the poorest nations, while in the more developed countries such gains have been largely exhausted. In the end we offer several avenues for more research based on the caveats discovered while working on this study.

Imposing concavity and the null-jointness property on the production possibilities frontier in case of polluting technologies

Economic theory requires the directional distance functions used to study the properties of production possibility sets of polluting technologies to be concave in both outputs, while the implied production possibilities frontier (PPF) is required to be concave with respect to the bad output. However, existing estimation frameworks do not preclude the estimation of convex PPFs. We analyze geometrical properties of the quadratic approximation to the directional output distance functions to derive a constraint that guarantees PPF concavity and consider the issue of imposing the property of null-jointness on the production possibilities set, which is also required by theory. We simulate a dataset corresponding to a concave PPF and show that in case concavity and null-jointness constraints are not imposed, it is possible that the conventional estimation framework may lead to erroneous conclusions with respect to the type of curvature of both the directional output distance function, and the PPF.

An Iterative Approach to the Estimation of CO 2 Abatement Costs

This study proposes an iterative approach to the estimation of the marginal abatement costs of undesirable outputs by computing the slope of the efficient production possibilities frontier on the basis of the efficient projection points generated by the directional output distance function approach due to Fare et al. (2005) based on duality theory. In case of the latter methodology, the estimated marginal abatement costs differ significantly depending on the choice of the directional output vector. In addition, depending on the curvature of the underlying PPF the efficient projection points may be located at a significant distance away from their actually observed counterparts. While it would be more logical to estimate marginal abatement costs as a PPF slope at a point corresponding to the actually observed emissions level, the methodology based on duality theory is likely to produce unstable results due to the problems associated with applying the theorem of implicit function differentiation. Since our methodology is not based on duality theory, our results are immune to both of these problems. We apply our methodology to a sample of Western European countries for the period of 1995-2011 to illustrate our approach.

Reducing Pollution Levels by the OECD Countries: Who Should Bear the Brunt?

We apply Shephard’s dual lemma and the concept of multi-output distance function to the estimation of marginal abatement costs of CO2 emissions reduction in the developing part of the East Asian and Pacific region, also including Korea and Japan. We find that abatement costs are the highest for Japan, while they are the cheapest for the small island states and Mongolia. While the social planner would allocate the task of reducing the regional emissions levels by 30% (stipulated by the Copenhagen accord) to countries with the lowest marginal abatement costs, this approach will require complete elimination of industrial sector in most of the region’s countries. We therefore suggest a more realistic scenario that involves placing a cap on the maximum amount of reduction by each individual country. In the long run, we argue that command and control policies of setting reduction targets will be less effective compared to the ones aimed at the reduction of marginal abatement costs.

A Constrained Maximum Likelihood Approach to the Estimation of Meta-Frontiers

We demonstrate that the estimation of meta-frontier parameters by minimizing the sum of the absolute values or squares of the distances between the meta-frontier and the individual group frontiers, which is an established practice in the literature, is equivalent to maximizing a constrained likelihood function that corresponds to a meta-frontier model treating those distances as a non-negative random variable distributed either exponentially or half-normally. We confirm our claim by empirical results based on the world’s agricultural production data. Our procedure of estimating the meta-frontier parameters by constrained maximum likelihood allows for both the statistical inference on the meta-frontier parameters and on the choice of the most preferred specification. Not only the constrained maximum likelihood estimation allows for the statistical inference that is not straightforward in case of the linear or quadratic programming approach, it also expands the variety of the possible meta-frontiers, each corresponding to a particular distributional assumption on the distances between meta- and the group frontiers.

Measuring the Value of a Moscow Apartment A Spatial Approach to the Hedonic Pricing of Attributes

In this paper we explore spatial effects in a hedonic price function framework for a large sample of apartments in Moscow. We find strong evidence of both spatial lag and spatial autocorrelation. Our results are robust across both the spatial model specifications and the choice of the spatial weight matrices. The fact that the quality attributes’ shadow prices we estimate are not much different from the OLS (ML) estimates suggests that spatial effects are orthogonal to the quality characteristics. One interesting finding is that an increase in the kitchen area contributes much more significantly to the apartment’s price compared a marginal increase in the living area, which is reflecting the traditional role kitchen has been playing in the Russian households as a dining and communication area. House type, time needed to walk to the nearest subway station and subway time to the city center are other important apartment attributes. Methodologically, we believe our study is demonstrating the need to develop spatial econometric techniques for application in the environment where both types of spatial effects are simultaneously present.

A Network-Economic Policy Study of Identity Management Systems and Implications for Security and Privacy Policy

Solving the problems associated with identity management in the “virtual” world is proving to be one of the keys to full realization of the economic and social benefits of networked information systems. By definition, the virtual world lacks the rich combination of sensory and contextual cues that permit organizations and individual humans interacting in the physical world to reliably identify people and authorize them to engage in certain transactions or access specific resources. Being able to determine who an online user is and what they are authorized to do thus requires an identity management infrastructure. Some of the most vexing problems associated with the Internet (the deluge of spam, the need to regulate access to certain kinds of content, securing networks from intrusion and disruption, problems of inter-jurisdictional law enforcement related to online activities, impediments to the sharing of distributed computing resources) are fundamentally the problems of identity management. And yet, efforts by organizations and governments to solve those problems by producing and consuming identity systems may create serious risks to freedom and privacy. Thus the implementation and maintenance of identity management systems raises important public policy issues. The identity management systems (the IMS-s) often tend to require more information from the consumers than would otherwise be necessary for the authentication purposes. The typical choice being analyzed in IMS is the one between a completely centralized or integrated system (one ID - one password, and a single sign-on) and the one comprising a plethora of (highly) specialized IMS-s (multiple ID-s and passwords). While the centralized system is the most convenient one, it is also likely to require too much personal information about the users, which may infringe on their rights to privacy and which definitely will result in serious damage should this personal information be stolen and/or abused. When more than two IMS-s interconnect (more of a practical side with various types of commercial values), they share the private information with each other, thus increasing consumers’ exposure to possible information misuse. It is thus rather obvious that the public policy plays an important role to maintain the structure of identity management systems ensuring the existence of a sound balance between the authentication requirements and consumers’ rights to privacy. The focus of this paper is on investigating this type of tradeoff by employing a theoretical framework with agents whose utility depends on the amount of private information revealed, and on making policy recommendations related to the issue of interconnection between alternative IMS-s. Our model derives optimal process of interconnection between IMS-s in the simple case of three IMS-s, then generalizing it to the case of more than three firms. The socially optimal outcome of the interconnection process in our model implies encouraging the interconnection between smaller rather than larger IMS-s.