Institute for Industrial and Market StudiesPostdoctoral research positionsExpired

Project: Factors of Productivity of Manufacturing Firms

The relatively low productivity of many Russian manufacturing enterprises due to technological gap, lack of market competences, low investment and innovation activity as well as unfavourable institutional environment for modernization lead to the continuous decline of manufacturing sector in terms of its share in GDP and in employment. At the same time most of the experts and the state authorities strongly believe that only cardinal modernization of manufacturing, in particular, of mid-tech and high-tech industries is the only way to provide high and sustainable rates of economic growth. To make this possible we should have better understanding of what particular factors (combinations of factors) prevent the Russian manufacturing firms to become more productive  and competitive on the global market, what system of motivations should be created to facilitate innovations and modernization activity at the firms’ level.

The goal of the current project is to investigate the ambiguous impact of globalization processes on the efficiency and behaviour of firms, including such channels as FDI, involvement in international trade, other forms of international networking and cooperation.  We are particularly interested in drawing into the team persons with experience in theoretical and empirical research of firms’ productivity and competitiveness and in comparative research in the field using cross-countries database on industrial firms. An experience  in interdisciplinary projects, skills and experience in spatial economics and economic sociology will be an advantage.  Russian team will include 3-4 people with extensive expertise in the Russian manufacturing firms’ behaviour and in empirical analysis of micro-level data. The members of the project team will have access to the empirical data for two rounds of monitoring of Russian manufacturing forms conducted in 2005 and 2009, as well as to available micro-level databases on economic performance of Russian firms (such as SPARK-Interfax, RUSLANA and other). Also the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies where the project is being implemented has a wide spectre of both statistical and original survey databases on Russian firms and regions that could be used in research.

Full-time research position includes:

• participating in the development of project research design;
• collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data on economic performance, productivity, competitiveness and behaviour of firms;
• managing research assistants’ data collection activity and providing other research outputs,  e.g. preparing presentations (2) and research papers(1-2) during the year.

General conditions for Post-doctoral Research positions can be found here.

Contact persons at the IIMS: Kuznetsov Boris (bkuznetsov@hse.ru, bkuznets@stanford.edu), Gonchar Ksenia (kgonchar@hse.ru, kgonchar@yandex.ru)