Does Foreign Ownership Matter? Russian Experience

The purpose of the paper is two-fold. The paper compares productivity of Russian firms that received foreign direct investments, and fully domestically owned firms. It also analyses spillovers from foreign-owned firms to domestic firms. Foreign firms are found to be more productive than the domestic ones, however, poor progress of reform in the region negatively affects productivity of foreign-owned firms. At the same time, there are positive spillovers between foreign-owned and domestic firms. This effect if particularly strong in the case of medium-sized firms (between 200 and 1000 employees), while spillovers on small firms are negative. The stock of human capital in the region is one of the main factors, which helps domestic firms to benefit from the entry of foreing firms.foreign direct investment, spillovers

Graph-based approaches for semi-supervised and cross-domain sentiment analysis

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyThe rapid development of Internet technologies has resulted in a sharp increase in the number of Internet users who create content online. Usergenerated content often represents people's opinions, thoughts, speculations and sentiments and is a valuable source of information for companies, organisations and individual users. This has led to the emergence of the eld of sentiment analysis, which deals with the automatic extraction and classi cation of sentiments expressed in texts. Sentiment analysis has been intensively researched over the last ten years, but there are still many issues to be addressed. One of the main problems is the lack of labelled data necessary to carry out precise supervised sentiment classi cation. In response, research has moved towards developing semi-supervised and crossdomain techniques. Semi-supervised approaches still need some labelled data and their e ectiveness is largely determined by the amount of these data, whereas cross-domain approaches usually perform poorly if training data are very di erent from test data. The majority of research on sentiment classi cation deals with the binary classi cation problem, although for many practical applications this rather coarse sentiment scale is not su cient. Therefore, it is crucial to design methods which are able to perform accurate multiclass sentiment classi cation. iii The aims of this thesis are to address the problem of limited availability of data in sentiment analysis and to advance research in semi-supervised and cross-domain approaches for sentiment classi cation, considering both binary and multiclass sentiment scales. We adopt graph-based learning as our main method and explore the most popular and widely used graph-based algorithm, label propagation. We investigate various ways of designing sentiment graphs and propose a new similarity measure which is unsupervised, easy to compute, does not require deep linguistic analysis and, most importantly, provides a good estimate for sentiment similarity as proved by intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations. The main contribution of this thesis is the development and evaluation of a graph-based sentiment analysis system that a) can cope with the challenges of limited data availability by using semi-supervised and crossdomain approaches b) is able to perform multiclass classi cation and c) achieves highly accurate results which are superior to those of most stateof- the-art semi-supervised and cross-domain systems. We systematically analyse and compare semi-supervised and cross-domain approaches in the graph-based framework and propose recommendations for selecting the most pertinent learning approach given the data available. Our recommendations are based on two domain characteristics, domain similarity and domain complexity, which were shown to have a signi cant impact on semi-supervised and cross-domain performance

Ethnic identity of saami teenagers – representatives of the indigenous peoples of the far north of Russia

This article addresses the problem of studying ethnic identity in Saami adolescents, representatives of indigenous peoples of the Russian Far North. The aim of the research is to study ethnic identity in adolescent Saami boys and girls. The article presents the results of an empirical research conducted using the “Types of ethnic identity” technique developed by G.U. Soldatova and S.V. Ryzhova. 39 Saami adolescents aged 12-13 years (18 boys and 21 girls) and 40 Saami adolescents aged 14-15 years (23 boys and 17 girls) participated in our empirical research as respondents. All the respondents live in the village of Lovozero in the Murmansk region. To identify specific features of ethnic identity development among Saami adolescents, we included ethnic Russian adolescent respondents: 59 people aged 12-13 years (31 boys and 28 girls), and 62 people aged 14-15 years (32 boys and 30 girls). Empirical data was collected in the period from April to May 2018. The analysis of the empirical research results allowed us to identify the dynamics in the development of ethno-nihilism, ethnic indifference, positive ethnic identity, ethno-egoism, ethno-isolationism and ethno-fanaticism in adolescent Saami boys and girls (12 to 15 years). The research revealed specific features of ethnic identity in Saami adolescents in comparison with their ethnic Russian agemates. The results of this research can be used to preserve and develop ethnic identity among indigenous adolescents in the Arctic territories of the European North of Russia. In future, this will allow to develop individual routes of training and education for indigenous adolescents in the Far North, to improve the system of psychological counselling and support. This will provide prospects for preservation of indigenous culture, traditions and ethnic identity, which will in its turn contribute to the development of the Northern territories, implementation of national interests, and achievement of the state strategic goals in the Arctic zone of the Russian Federation

Development of time perspective in nenets, Sami and Russian adolescents: A comparative analysis

This paper is concerned with the issue of studying specific features of the development of time perspective in adolescents representing different ethnic groups living in the North of Russia. The study includes a comparative analysis of the development of time perspective in Nenets, Sami, and ethnic Russian male and female adolescents.The current article presents the results of an empirical study conducted using the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory. The respondents in the empirical study were 99 Nenets adolescents aged 12-15 years (54 boys and 45 girls); 79 Sami adolescents aged 12-15 years (41 boys and 38 girls); 121 ethnic Russian adolescents aged 12-15 years (63 boys and 58 girls).The comparative analysis of the development of time perspective in Nenets, Sami, and ethnic Russian adolescents has shown the presence of similar trends characteristic of the age group in general, and specific features at the same time. The results of the study enrich the scientific understanding of the phenomenon of time perspective, supplement and expand the understanding of the process of personality formation in representatives of different ethnic groups living in the North of Russia. The identified features of time perspective in adolescents will help to supplement the programs of psychological assistance and support for adolescents in the aspect of building life strategies, implementing capabilities of forecasting life prospects and managing time resources