Surveillance systems in modern cities are often regarded as the great state panopticon of omnipresent cameras. Here we challenge this view by empirically analyzing the spatial context of CCTV equipment in four European capitals: Moscow, Paris, Brussels, and Edinburgh. We gather locations of CCTV equipment installed in public places by city officials and train a machine learner to predict camera locations given the urban morphology. We then discern differences and commonalities in surveillance system design across the cities. Only in Paris CCTV equipment is found to be evenly distributed throughout the city, resembling a panopticon. In Brussels and Edinburgh CCTV equipment forms an intangible wall in the city center and on the outskirts, resembling a medieval fortress. In Moscow we observe a paternalistic approach where children-related places are more likely to be covered by CCTV equipment. The paper concludes by arguing that CCTV equipment should be conceptualized not as a surveillance system, but as an element of urban security infrastructure.
The preprint is avaliable by the link.
Most studies in the USA show that judges grant severe penalties in trials especially in jury trails comparing the plea. In Russia, court statistics shows the similar trend has been performed as by regional courts since 2014 just in the context of the decline in both the jurisdiction of jury trials and the number of jury cases. However, since mid-2018, jury trials have expanded their jurisdiction on the district courts, causing large logistical and time costs. Jury in Russia grant the acquittals hundred times more frequently than professional judges alone and that stimulates defendants to jury trials. Simultaneously, the court statistics shows that district courts perform the jury penalty despite the jury leniency. Expert interviews with judges held in 2019-2021 discover that this sentencing policy has two main motives: first, to compensate with more severe punishment for the resources, time and risks that the defendant caused to judiciary and prosecution by his/her motion for a jury trial, and the second — use the policy of sentencing as a factor deterring other defendants from choosing a jury trial.
The research paper in Russia is published here
Recent issue of Applied Economics Letters includes a research article by Ruslan Kuchakov и Dmitriy Skougarevskiy on the effects of wage subsidied by Russian central government on employment and profit margins.
This report summarizes the annual federal agencies’ regulatory activity. We analyzed 550k inspections to highlight trends in Russian regulation in 2021. Full text (in Russia)
In a new policy memo titled “Legal Norms on Forced Breach of Contract (Force Majeure): a study of enforcement by State Commercial Courts” IRL researchers study how Russian commercial courts tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. We found 4161 cases considering this issue of non-performance due to force majeure from the universe of all rulings in March 2020 — October 2021. We then focused our analysis on cases related to the impossibility of fulfilling obligations under loan and credit agreements in disputes with banks, as well as in disputes of organizations affected by the pandemic.
Recent issue of the European Journal of Risk Regulation includes a paper by Vladimir Kudryavtsev, Ruslan Kuchakov, and Daria Kuznetsova titled «Two monkey wrenches in the Russian regulatory reform». This paper assesses the 2016 regulatory reform in Russia.
Juniour researcher IRL Dmitrii Serebrennikov and Julia Kuzmina had an article published in Journal of Economic Sociology (Ekonomicheskaya sotsiologiya). The paper is review of Donald Rubin causal model in the current field experiment researches. Text is availiable by link (in Russian).
The book by Timur Bocharov and Aryna Dzmitryieva "Legal Education in Russia and Abroad: Between University, Profession, State and Market" is now available online.
The book analyzes legal education in Russia. The research uses extensive empirical material (analysis of statistics, questionnaire survey, expert interviews and focus groups). Authors distinguish three segments of legal education and analyze the teaching and approaches to the training of lawyers in mass, elite, and departmental institutions of higher education. Full text (in Russian)
This memo suggestes summary of the study which examines the previously unexplored form of social support that inmates enjoy: money transfers. We study the distance decay of financial support of prisoners. Drawing on proprietary data from a Russian prison tech company, we explore the universe of money transfers to any penal facility in Russia in 2017–19. To estimate the distance effect we build a gravity model of remittance flows from 1,117 cities to 931 penal facilities. The features of Russian penal geography reflect on the volume, frequency, and direction of transfers received by inmates. The gravity model of remittances suggests a pronounced distance decay. Correctional facilities closest to the sender city (0...144 km away, 1st percentile of pairwise distance) receive almost 10 times more funds than the facilities located 9,789...13,625 km away from the senders (the 99th percentile).
Read more in the article preprint «Prisoner social ties, money transfers, and sender-recipient distance: Evidence from Russia (in English)
Text is availiable by the link (in Russian).
We present a policy memo “Same Point of Law”: Citations of [Precedent] Cases in Commercial Courts". We examined 6.9 million texts of rulings of state commercial (“arbitrazh”) courts to identify references to judicial law-making: legal positions set forth by courts in similar cases. Some findings from this study:
We also present the Precedent Atlas — an interactive map of cases, available at http://precedent.enforce.spb.ru. Read the full text (in Russian): full text.
