Poverty and economic dislocation reduce compliance with COVID-19 shelter-in-place protocols.

Shelter-in-place ordinances were the first wide-spread policy measures aimed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Compliance with shelter-in-place directives is individually costly and requires behavioral changes across diverse sub-populations. Leveraging county-day measures on population movement derived from cellphone location data and the staggered introduction of local mandates, we find that economic factors have played an important role in determining the level of compliance with local shelter-in-place ordinances in the US.

Field experiment estimate of electoral fraud in Russian parliamentary elections.

Electoral fraud is a widespread phenomenon, especially outside the developed world. Despite abundant qualitative and anecdotal evidence on its existence from around the world, there is very limited quantitative evidence on the extent of electoral fraud. We exploit random assignment of independent observers to 156 of 3,164 polling stations in the city of Moscow to estimate the effect of electoral fraud on the outcome of the Russian parliamentary elections held on December 4, 2011.

Political model of social evolution.

Almost all democratic societies evolved socially and politically out of authoritarian and nondemocratic regimes. These changes not only altered the allocation of economic resources in society but also the structure of political power. In this paper, we develop a framework for studying the dynamics of political and social change.

[The manifestation of necrophagy in the populations of rodents carrying the virus of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome].

The role of necrophagy in the epizootic manifestations of hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS) is first shown. By analyzing a great body of data obtained in the Saratov Region in 1982-2000, it has been established that the frequency of manifestations of necrophagy depends on many factors, the most important of which are a season, the size (density) of populations of small mammals, their species composition and the type of biotopes inhabited by these animals. Necrophagy is ascertained to be of great importance in HFRS foci as one of the alimentary routes of infection transmission in the parasitic systems.