Vadim Kufenko

• Dr. oec. (University of Hohenheim)
• PostDoc Position at University of Hohenheim

This study examines the social media activities of gambling providers in Germany, focusing on the platform Twitter. A collection of 34.151 tweets from 13 Twitter accounts was made, representing casinos, sports betting, state lotteries, social lotteries and lottery brokers. We apply an explorative mixed-methods approach, integrating a summative cont...

Did late Imperial Russia suffer from Malthusian pressures? At first glance, with its rising levels of population and per capita income, it seems Russia was in a transition away from Malthusian equilibrium. However, the joint increase in population and per capita income could also have been the result of Russia’s high land-to-labor ratio. Which of t...

Education, general health, and reproductive health are key indicators of human development. Investments in these domains can also promote economic growth. This paper argues for human development–related investments based on (1) a theoretical economic growth model with poverty traps, (2) a literature review of evidence that different human developme...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life", such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of being easy to interpret and to calculate with manageable data requirements. Against this backdrop, there is a need for a measure of well...

Does inequality affect outcomes? To answer, we use the microcosm of Olympic competitions by asking whether a country's level of inequality diminishes its performance. If it does, is it conditional on institutional factors? We argue that the ability of economically free societies to win medals will not be affected by inequality. In these societies,...

Time-series filters have become a major tool for univariate and multivariate analysis of business cycles. Yet, the caveats of filtering, such as distortions in spectral density often mentioned in the literature, may have substantial implications for empirical analysis. This paper focuses on two main problems: univariate and multivariate spurious in...

Per capita GDP has limited use as a well-being indicator because it does not capture many dimensions that imply a "good life," such as health and equality of opportunity. However, per capita GDP has the virtues of easy interpretation and can be calculated with manageable data requirements. Against this backdrop, a need exists for a measure of well-...

We test the recently proposed history-augmented Solow model with respect to its predictions on the evolution of cross-country income inequality between nowadays industrialized countries. Using a broad range of deterministic and stochastic simulations, we illustrate that the model predicts the following pattern. There is low cross-country income ine...

In 1837–38, the British colonies of Upper and Lower Canada rebelled. The rebellion was more virulent (and better organized) in Lower Canada. The rebellions were also concentrated in the richer areas of that colony. In this paper, we use the census of 1831 and databases of rebellious events to explain how the rebels managed to overcome the problem o...

We assess the effects of changes in household size on the long‐run evolution of living standards and on cross‐country convergence. When the observed changes in average household size across countries are taken into consideration, growth in living standards is slower throughout the 20th century as compared to a measure based on per capita GDP. Furth...

Normally, privatisation is seen as beneficial. This paper considers the case of Serbia – a latecomer in the matter – where privatisation was partly a result of exogenous pressures and where the process has been deemed a failure. In Serbia, a sizeable number of privatised firms were bought by bureaucrats and politicians and all firms were subjected...

This paper empirically investigates and theoretically reflects on the generality of some “stylized facts” of business cycles. Using data for 1960–2016 and a sample of OECD countries, the duration of business cycles as well as three models capturing core macroeconomic relations are estimated: the Phillips curve (the inflation-unemployment nexus), Ok...

We consider the argument that inequality drives society to expend more resources on supervision, which imposes an extra cost on doing business – an argument advanced notably by Samuel Bowles, who framed it as a coordination failure. We propose an alternative, though not mutually exclusive, explanation in the form of government failure. We argue tha...

New TFP estimates drawn from the neglected census of 1831 for Lower Canada are used to test the controversial (but still dominant) traditional “poor French farmers” explanation for a prolonged economic crisis. The new evidence shows that French-speaking areas were equally as productive as English-speaking areas, something that upturns the establish...

The role of the Old Believers (OB) in the development of Russian industry has been noted by many historians; however, empirical research on the topic is scarce. Using official censuses, archive sources, and industrial reports, the role of OB enterprises in the Moscow textile industry for the period 1832–1890 was examined. The analysis highlighted t...

This paper uses a novel dataset of heights collected from the records of the Quebec City prison between 1813 and 1847 to survey the French-Canadian population of Quebec—which was then known either as Lower Canada or Canada East. Using a birth-cohort approach with 10 year birth cohorts from the 1780s to the 1820s, we find that French-Canadian prison...

The cumulative dissertation covers diverse aspects of empirical analysis of business cycles and institutions. There are three research questions in focus. To address the interplay between business cycles and institutions, the first research question is formulated: could the Malthusian cycles be present in a frontier economy with abundance of land a...

We examine the role of demographic change for regional convergence in living standards in Canada. Due to economies of scale within a family, decreasing household size has an impact on convergence in living standards, while per capita income convergence remains unaffected. We find that, by relying on per capita income, the dispersion of living stand...

The bi-polar confrontation between the Soviet Union and the USA involved many leading game theorists from both sides of the Iron Curtain: Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Michael Intriligator, John Nash, Thomas Schelling and Steven Brams from the United States and Nikolay Vorob’ev, Leon A. Petrosyan, Elena B. Yanovskaya and Olga N. Bondareva fr...

It is sometimes pointed out that economic research is prone to move in cycles and react to particular events such as crises and recessions. The present paper analyses this issue through a quantitative analysis by answering the research question of whether or not the economic literature on business cycles is correlated with movements and changes in...

This empirical analysis is based on the latent variable framework to identify key determinants of protests in Russia during 2011–2012. We derive logistic regressions from the revolution constraints based on economic (the political Kuznets Curve) and socio-psychological (grievance) theories of protest. Our findings suggest a positive linear relation...

In this paper, we study Malthusian pressures in a frontier economy. Using the empirical data on real prices and demographic variables from 1688 to 1860 for Quebec and Montreal, we test for the existence of Malthusian pressures. Bearing in mind the particularities of frontier economies and the development of the Canadian economy, we conduct a Grange...

Having considered the determinants of economic growth and discussed the impact of the resource curse on human capital, we now have to proceed to the core topic of our research: income growth and income inequality. The main question is not only what drives economic growth, but whether it is fairly distributed. To avoid misunderstanding, we have to s...

Having confronted the neo-classical growth model with the data on the Russian regions, we now have to focus on the main issue for the Russian economy – the resource curse. The reason why the blessing with the natural resources may turn into a curse is extremely hard to capture with econometric techniques. Thus, we have to analyze the data on indust...

Empirical analysis of the economic growth and income distribution was performed in several steps and each chapter has a separate conclusion summary. In Chapter 1 we analysed growth determinants and convergence in a cross-section and dynamic frameworks. Chapter 2 focused on one of the main threats to economic growth in Russia: the resource curse and...

Vadim Kufenko provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of various aspects of economic growth and income inequality in the Russian regions using different estimation techniques from the cross-section OLS and logistic models to dynamic panel data system GMM. The general period for the data is 1995-2012. Acknowledging the crucial role of human ca...

Bearing in mind the fact that this is an empirical work, in this chapter we will briefly discuss the context and the evolution of the neo-classical growth model in order to create sufficient theoretical foundation for the empirical models used in other sections.

The paper explores the empirical macro- and microeconomic aspects of debt deflation. After performing VAR and Granger causality analysis on the quarterly 1980-2011 filtered macroeconomic data for the USA, we find evidence for the endogenous money supply theory. Highlighting the empirical observation of the recent credit cycles we put emphasis on th...