The Role of the West in Evolving World Order,and Russian Politics

The coexistence of modernities of different structural types, with different historical foundations, and with different systemic modes of structural organization leads to the coexistence of traditional and new actors within a single spatiotemporal arrangement of international relations and to the differentiation of macroregions and nation-states in accordance with structural principles of organization. In the final analysis, the type of political access in specific nation-states and the combination of different types of political access in macroregions with different modes of structural organization and at different stages of historical development influence the developmental strategies of states and the character and priorities of their foreign policies; these in turn continue in significant measure to shape the processes that form the space of world politics. The identification of such interconnections makes it possible to analyze the influence of the type of sociopolitical access in states, coalitions of states, and global regions on the formative processes and character of the space of world politics and to engage in social engineering of the format of national and world space with a view to optimizing conditions for national development. Theoretical and practical conceptualization of the interconnection between external and internal processes, including their political component, will enable us to work out applied theories of competitive models of cooperative regional and national development and strategies for national modernization and development with adequate protection of national interests.     

The Statistics of Simulating Chaos

When simulating a dynamical system, the computation is actually of a spatially discretized system, because finite machine arithmetic replaces continuum state space. For chaotic dynamical systems, the discretized simulations often have collapsing effects, to a fixed point or to short cycles. Statistical properties of these phenomena can be modelled with random mappings with an absorbing centre. The model gives results which are very much in line with computational experiments. The effects are discussed with special reference to the family of mappings f (x)=1-|1-2x|,x [0,1],1,<,,<,. Computer experiments show close agreement with predictions of the model.     

The 'demon' problem of Youden: Exponential case

We consider the problem of finding the probability of a sample mean falling above the (n - k)th-order statistic in a random sample of size n. Explicit expressions are obtained for the exponential distribution. Some applications that pertain to testing for outliers and goodness of fit are given.     

The number of records within a random interval of the current record value

LetX ₁,X ₂, … be a sequence of i.i.d. random variables with some continuous distribution functionF. LetX(n) be then-th record value associated with this sequence and μ _n ⁻ , μ _n ⁺ be the variables that count the number of record values belonging to the random intervals(f−(X(n)), X(n)), (X(n), f+(X(n))), wheref−, f+ are two continuous functions satisfyingf−(x)<x, f+(x)>x. Properties of μ _n ⁻ , μ _n ⁺ are studied in the present paper. Some statistical applications connected with these variables are also provided.     

Limit results for ordered uniform spacings

Let Δ _k:n  = X _k,n  − X _k-1,n (k = 1, 2, . . . , n + 1) be the spacings based on uniform order statistics, provided X _0,n  = 0 and X _n+1,n  = 1. Obtained from uniform spacings, ordered uniform spacings 0 = Δ_0,n  < Δ_1,n  < . . . < Δ _n+1,n , are discussed in the present paper. Distributional and limit results for them are in the focus of our attention.     

Number of observations near the maximum in an F α-scheme

Let K _n (a) be the number of observations in the interval (M _n ,?a, M _n ), where M _n is the maximum value in a sequence of size n. We study the asymptotic properties of K _n (a) under the F ^α-scheme and discuss the influence of the associated sequence α _n on the limit behaviour of this random variable.     

MODELING MODEL UNCERTAINTY

Recently there has been a great deal of interest in studying monetary policy under model uncertainty. We point out that different assumptions about the uncertainty may result in drastically different “robust” policy recommendations. Therefore, we develop new methods to analyze uncertainty about the parameters of a model, the lag specification, the serial correlation of shocks, and the effects of real‐time data in one coherent structure. We consider both parametric and nonparametric specifications of this structure and use them to estimate the uncertainty in a small model of the U.S. economy. We then use our estimates to compute robust Bayesian and minimax monetary policy rules, which are designed to perform well in the face of uncertainty. Our results suggest that the aggressiveness recently found in robust policy rules is likely to be caused by overemphasizing uncertainty about economic dynamics at low frequencies. (JEL: E52, C32, D81)     

Testing Hypotheses About the Number of Factors in Large Factor Models

In this paper we study high‐dimensional time series that have the generalized dynamic factor structure. We develop a test of the null of k₀ factors against the alternative that the number of factors is larger than k₀ but no larger than k₁>k₀. Our test statistic equals max_{k0<k k1}(γ_k−γ_k+1)(γ_k+1−γ_k+2), where γ_i is the ith largest eigenvalue of the smoothed periodogram estimate of the spectral density matrix of data at a prespecified frequency. We describe the asymptotic distribution of the statistic, as the dimensionality and the number of observations rise, as a function of the Tracy–Widom distribution and tabulate the critical values of the test. As an application, we test different hypotheses about the number of dynamic factors in macroeconomic time series and about the number of dynamic factors driving excess stock returns.     

Russia

The author clarifies the concept of "historical politics"; compares its practice in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, and (over the last two to three years) Russia; and considers its harmful consequences for both international relations and domestic political pluralism.