The paper describes the contributions of T. Schelling and R.J. Aumann, the Nobel Prize laureates of 2005 in economics, to modern economics and social sciences. Their key contributions were in the field of the game theory — a major tool to study human interactions and rational behavior in a wide variety of contexts, from applied industrial organization to labor economics, public policy, international relations and political science. Works by Aumann and Schelling were pathbreaking in this respect, and have paved the way to many modern developments that enhance our understanding of human rationality.

     Prospects of the improvement of property rights protection in Russia are analyzed in the article through the prism of the economics of property rights. The level of independency of judiciary as a factor of property rights protection, and influence of the level of competition on the political market on judicial independency are stressed. Basing on the positive dynamics in Russia of the share of fiscal revenue that is not connected with value creation, the conclusion is drawn that there are great obstacles for improving the situation with property rights protection.

     The article considers evolution of the inflation theory in Russian economic science of the XX century, using a lot of historical documents. The author compares different views on inflation and analyzes their connection to the progress in understanding inflation as a phenomenon of economic life.

     In this paper data from a large nationally representative survey in Russia are used to analyze the distributional and welfare implications of the military draft. The authors focus on draft avoidance as a common response to highly unpopular conscription system ridden by corruption. A theoretical model that describes household compliance decisions with respect to enlistment is developed. Several econometric techniques are employed to estimate the effect of household characteristics on the probability to serve in the army and the draft-induced implications for household income. The results indicate that the burden of conscription falls excessively on the poor. Poor, low-educated, rural households are much more likely to have their sons enlisted compared to urban, wealthy and better-educated families. The losses incurred by the poor are disproportionately large and exceed the statutory rate of personal income tax.

     The article considers macroeconomic aspects of conscription. The authors provide macroeconomic data, doing cost-benefit analysis of different variants of reforms in this sphere, and come to the conclusion that there are opportunities to significantly improve the existing strategy of reforms in that domain as proposed by the Ministry of Defense.

     A peculiarity of the subsoil use system that is currently being formed in Russia is the neglect of development of complementary institutions such as norms and rules of the subsoil use or conflict resolution procedures. Instead, soft institutional conditions are emerging that allow subsoil-using companies to manipulate business rules and extract quasi-rents. As a result the property rights assignment process in the petroleum industry is biased towards the private form of ownership to the detriment of its public form. This also undermines the due process of key capital assets’ reproduction including reserves development.

     The article deals with the new theoretical approaches to natural monopoly. It describes essential features of the appropriate branches of economy. The role of the state in the regulation of natural monopolies in the developed and transition economies is also analyzed. The author compares the advantages and shortcomings of various institutional alternatives of organization of natural monopolies functioning as well as the perspectives of public-private partnership in this sphere. Special attention is paid to the analysis of Russian natural monopolies reforms.

     The article focuses on diversification and destandartization of employment in the Russian economy. The authors discuss global and objective preconditions for this process but underline a few specific features of the Russian case. The latter are due to the market transition as well as to incomplete and selective enforcement of the excessively restrictive employment protection legislation. This explains high incidence of household-based subsistence farming, underemployment, time-related overemployment, informal employment against low level of formal contracts for fixed-term or part-time employment. Using representative data the authors illustrate all major forms of non-standard employment in Russia that have evolved since 1992.

     The characteristics of private property in Russia are analyzed in the article from the political economy point of view. To the author's opinion, the specifics of private property could not have been identified and solved appropriately: the reason is that the highest level of the development of private property — the property on means of production — has not been formed during Russia’s history. That is why adequate institutions of private law as marginal forms of legal consciousness in civil and business spheres could not be established. Real business law is different from the formal legal one. The major cause of such incompliance within de jure and de facto economic norms is the difference between basic economic structures: property on means of production — power-ownership in Russia - and western private property. Understanding of this helps to define problems and possible scenarios of business’ development in Russia.