Anna Pestova

Monetary policy regimes in Russia: Guidelines for further quantitative studies

This paper analyzes the basic parameters of monetary policy in 2000—2015 in Russia. We provide the overview of tools and objectives of monetary policy of the Bank of Russia and identify the periods of homogeneity of monetary policy regimes: from money base targeting to exchange rate targeting and finally, to interest rates policy. On the basis of this research we develop the recommendations for further quantitative research aimed at estimation of monetary policy effects in Russia.

Stress Test: Will Russian Banks Need New Government Support?

The article analyzes factors affecting growth of the share of nonperforming loans in the loan portfolios of Russian banks. Using the results of stress tests of Russian banks, the authors assess their potential capital needs in 2010 and estimate the share of government assistance in capital injections. The authors also define the scale of vulnerable bank groups in the Russian banking sector.

Leading Indicators of the Business Cycle: Dynamic Logit Models for OECD Countries and Russia

In this paper, I develop the leading indicators of the business cycle turning points exploiting the quarterly panel dataset comprising OECD countries and Russia over the 1980-2013 period. Contrasting to the previous studies, I combine data on OECD countries and Russia into a single dataset and develop universal models suitable for the entire sample with a quality of predictions comparable to the analogues of single-country models. On the basis of conventional dynamic discrete dependent variable framework I estimate the business cycle leading indicator models at different forecasting horizons (from one to four quarters). The results demonstrate that there is a trade-off between forecasting accuracy and the earliness of the recession signal. Best predictions are achieved for the model with one quarter lag (approximately 94% of the observations were correctly classified with a noise-to-signal ratio of 7%). However, even the model with the four quarter lags correctly predicts more than 80% of recessions with the noise-to-signal ratio of 25% can be useful for the policy analysis. I also reveal significant gains of accounting for the credit market variables when forecasting recessions at the long horizons (four quarter lag) as their use leads to a significant reduction of the noise-to-signal ratio of the model. I propose using the “optimal” cut-off threshold of the binary models based on the minimization of regulator loss function arising from different types of wrong classification. I show that this optimal threshold improves model forecasts as compared to other exogenous thresholds.

The Cult of Cash in Russia

The authors survey the types of cashless payments, explain their advantages and disadvantages, analyze the factors that promote and impede their use in Russia, and consider how monetary and credit policy and technical measures can facilitate the transition from cash to cashless payment.