Approach to assessing the effects of the high-speed rail development: world experience and prospects for Russia

The transport industry is one of the key components of the Russian economy, not only generating a substantial amount of gross value added, but also ensuring the spatial connectivity of the country's territories. Acceleration of technological progress, introduction of new technologies in various industries require corresponding increase in cargo and passenger transportation, which implies speeding up the development of high-speed transportation, following the path most intensively developing countries took in the last decade. On the global scale, high-speed rail transport is confidently occupying a niche in the range of 400-800 km when organizing mass transportation and ensuring the shortest travel time. In Russia, high-speed rail service is just beginning to develop as part of the goals and objectives set forth in Presidential Decree No. 204 of May 7, 2018 and the Comprehensive Plan for the Modernization and Expansion of Mainline Infrastructure, the Program for organizing high-speed and high-speed rail service in the Russian Federation. At the same time, despite numerous studies of the quantitative effects of investment in transport infrastructure, the effects of high-speed rail service development have not been studied in practice in the domestic economic literature. This determines high relevance of such a study, as well as an assessment of the positive effects of the development of high-speed rail communication in Russia within the framework of scenario analysis. The purpose of the study is to develop an approach and conduct scenario assessments of the socio-economic effects of the development of high-speed railway communication in Russia. Main goals: a review of approaches to assessing the effects of HSR, analysis of strategic plans for the development of HSR in Russia, two-ways effects assessment: at the country panel and at the regional level in a simulation model. The research methods include economic and mathematical modeling and economic analysis based on model complexes built at RANEPA, particularly a prototype spatial simulation model of the Russian economy. The object of the research is the effects of the development of high-speed railway communication in Russia. Key results: based on cross-country data, it is shown that the development of both high-speed and express rail service contributes significantly to economic growth: the elasticity of GDP per capita for the length of high-speed and express rail lines is 0.029–0.036 and 0.042-0.048 respectively, for the presence of HSR - 0.125. Scenario analysis based on a simulation model also demonstrates an increase in population mobility, cost of living, and other indicators in the regions where HSR is projected to be buil

Development of Scientific and Methodological Approaches to Identifying the Actual Boundaries of Agglomerations in Russia, Taking into Account the Spatial Distribution of Economic Activity

Urban agglomerations are the core of the country's economic development and sources of Russia's competitiveness in the global economy (according to various estimates, only Moscow agglomeration generates about 25% of the country's GDP

Search for new heavy resonances decaying to WW, WZ, ZZ, WH, or ZH boson pairs in the all-jets final state in proton-proton collisions at s=13TeV

A search for new heavy resonances decaying to WW, WZ, ZZ, WH, or ZH boson pairs in the all-jets final state is presented. The analysis is based on proton-proton collision data recorded by the CMS detector in 2016–2018 at a centre-of-mass energy of 13 TeV at the CERN LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138fb−1. The search is sensitive to resonances with masses between 1.3 and 6TeV, decaying to bosons that are highly Lorentz-boosted such that each of the bosons forms a single large-radius jet. Machine learning techniques are employed to identify such jets. No significant excess over the estimated standard model background is observed. A maximum local significance of 3.6 standard deviations, corresponding to a global significance of 2.3 standard deviations, is observed at masses of 2.1 and 2.9 TeV. In a heavy vector triplet model, spin-1 Z′ and W′ resonances with masses below 4.8TeV are excluded at the 95% confidence level (CL). These limits are the most stringent to date. In a bulk graviton model, spin-2 gravitons and spin-0 radions with masses below 1.4 and 2.7TeV, respectively, are excluded at 95% CL. Production of heavy resonances through vector boson fusion is constrained with upper cross section limits at 95% CL as low as 0.1fb

Measurement of the tt¯ charge asymmetry in events with highly Lorentz-boosted top quarks in pp collisions at s=13 TeV

The measurement of the charge asymmetry in top quark pair events with highly Lorentz-boosted top quarks decaying to a single lepton and jets is presented. The analysis is performed using proton-proton collisions at s=13TeV with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 138 fb−1. The selection is optimized for top quarks produced with large Lorentz boosts, resulting in nonisolated leptons and overlapping jets. The top quark charge asymmetry is measured for events with a tt¯ invariant mass larger than 750 GeV and corrected for detector and acceptance effects using a binned maximum likelihood fit. The measured top quark charge asymmetry of (0.42−0.69+0.64)% is in good agreement with the standard model prediction at next-to-next-to-leading order in quantum chromodynamic perturbation theory with next-to-leading-order electroweak corrections. The result is also presented for two invariant mass ranges, 750–900 and >900GeV