Ekaterina Travova

Using newly collected data on the contemporary density of Orthodox organization in Post-Soviet Russia and the historical spatial distribution of Orthodox monasteries before the Russian Revolution, I show that a denser Church presence is associated with a higher approval rating for the current president and a larger share of votes cast for the government candidate (ruling party) in elections. Today, the Church is less able to attract new churchgoers. However, it does affect the political preferences of those who, regardless of their faith in God, self-identify as Orthodox. The potential channel is the growing media presence of the Church.

This paper examines the use of high-powered performance-based incentives for civil servants, focusing on drug-related cases registered by the Russian police. Using an event study approach and bunching analysis, I show that the incentives arising from the performance evaluation system of police officers can significantly influence their behavior. Specifically, I find evidence suggesting that this impact can result in the manipulation of drug quantities seized by the police, moving offenders from below to above the punishment threshold. Further negative consequences of the strong performance-based incentives are inequality in the enforcement of law, prolonged sentences, and increased probability of pretrial detention. Thus, I determine that police officers are more likely to manipulate the drug quantities seized from men. I also find that the manipulation increases the probability of pretrial detention by 9% and adds one more year of incarceration, which is a 67% increase on the average sentence length without manipulation.

Measuring cultural values at scale remains a central challenge in the social sciences. We show when first names provide a powerful window into these underlying cultural orientations, and when they do not. We introduce a novel framework to detect which dimensions of culture are reflected in names and offer individual-level evidence of these cultural signals. Linking Danish administrative data with survey responses, we validate that first names capture parents' cultural identities along four dimensions: religiosity, collectivism, nationalism, and traditionalism. We then present three applications. First, we develop new methods to extrapolate survey information to entire populations using first names. Second, leveraging full-count data on family links, names, demographics, and socio-economic characteristics, we analyze the determinants of naming choice and highlight factors that must be accounted for when using names as cultural indicators. Third, we document how the four cultural orientations have evolved over the past half century. Our findings demonstrate the potential and the limitations of names as indicators of cultural values and open new avenues for studying cultural change.

Do people in secular societies cope with adversity using their faith? Linking Danish administrative registers with survey data from the European Values Study, we develop a revealed preference measure of religiosity based on parents' religious expression in naming their newborn children. We use the first names to extrapolate religious values expressed in the surveys to the full population. Focusing on the unexpected death of a grandparent as a bereavement shock, we find that parents are significantly more likely to give their child a religious first name in the years following a parent's death. This effect is identified in an event-study framework across 287,609 persons comparing similar families before and after sudden losses, and it supports the religious coping hypothesis that individuals turn to religion to cope with adversity. We confirm that this naming response reflects an increase in religiosity rather than other factors: the effect is robust to controls and sibling comparisons, not driven by naming children after the deceased, and mirrored by higher self-reported religiosity in surveys post-bereavement. Our results provide novel evidence of a causal impact of personal tragedy on religious behavior.

This paper reexamines the relationship between life satisfaction and employment shocks during the transition period in 12 former communist countries of Eastern Europe, and explores whether these shocks have broader political or social implications. Using newly collected data on regional sector-specific employment to create an instrumental variable, we find a significant long-term negative impact of transition disruptions on present-day life satisfaction. Causal mediation analysis indicates that social well-being and mental health are key contributors to this effect, while economic impact appears secondary. We observe no significant changes in political orientation, except in East Germany, where transition shocks tend to shift political views to the right. This finding aligns with broader trends of declining political participation and trust.