About

I am a PhD student at CERGE-EI, studying Economic Research in Prague. I specialize in development economics, economics of crime, and political economy, with a primary focus on the Russian setting. My supervisor is Štěpán Jurajda.

Currently, I work as a part-time consultant for the World Bank Group, where I focus on natural language processing applications for low-resource languages. My work encompasses text analysis using both classical methods (LDA, NMF) and transformers. I am also developing machine translation and automatic speech recognition systems, including audio preprocessing and training and fine-tuning of transformer models.

My partner Maksim Smirnov is on the job market this year. He is an amazing econometrician specializing in IV, high-dimensional settings, and causal inference, and would make a great addition to any team.

Work in Progress

  • Silent Protest on the Bench: The Impact of War on Ethnic Sentencing Disparities in Russian Courts

    with Arsenii Shcherbov

    Slides
    This project is supported by the Charles University Grant Agency no. 69224

    In this paper we investigate the effect of a 2022 war announcement and intensification of nationalistic propaganda on the sentencing disparities in Russian courts. We leverage the unexpected nature of war announcement in a regression discontinuity design, using February 2022 as a cut-off date. Our identification strategy is supported by the random allocation of cases inside of courts, which we also statistically check, and a series of robustness checks. To quantify the effect, we use a unique dataset on case-level and imply ethnicity of judge and defendant based on their names with a machine-learning classification model. Focusing on different ethnic pairs of judges and defendants in minor offense cases, we find that ethnic judges become more punitive towards Russian defendants after war. Thus, we find a 5.3 percentage point increase in probability to be sentenced to detention among this ethnic pair. This effect is particularly pronounced in localities with lower social trust, ethnic diversity, and democratic values (and higher predisposition to be affected by propaganda), suggesting that this change may be interpreted as a silent protest of ethnic minorities. These findings contribute to our understanding of how political shocks and propaganda intensification can affect ethnic discrimination within state institutions, particularly in autocratic settings.

    Presented at: CES Biannual Meeting 2024, Political Behaviour Colloquium 2025, RES 2025, EWMES 2025

  • The Impact of War on Ethnic Sentencing Disparities in Russian Courts: Extension to Criminal Cases

    with Arsenii Shcherbov

    We are working on extending our paper on judicial sentencing disparities to criminal cases, including driving-under-influence and theft. Currently, we are working with LLMs to classify cases and extract additional information from the texts of decisions.

  • Religion and State Power in Wartime Russia

    with Clara Sievert

    Working paper and slides available upon request.

  • 2018 Russian Judicial Reform and Its Effects on Gender Disparities in Russian Courts

    Data preparation and analysis ongoing.

Teaching

CERGE-EI

2022 – 2024
  • Teaching Assistant, Microeconomics II — First year PhD in Economic Research (February 2023 – March 2023)
  • Teaching Assistant, Introduction to R — First year MA/PhD in Economic Research (October 2022, 2023, 2024)

Higher School of Economics, Saint Petersburg

2019
  • Teaching Assistant, Macroeconomics — Third year BA in Economics (September 2019 – December 2019)

Grants & Awards

The Charles University Grant Agency

March 2024 – March 2026

Student grant to support ongoing research projects, ~7,500 EUR/year

Research Fellowship Competition

June 2022

3rd prize, CERGE-EI, ~1,500 EUR

Volunteering

English Teacher

2022 – Present

Samantha's Group Project

I believe that giving back to the community is important, which is why I have been supporting the Samantha's Group Project since June 2022. This initiative provides free language education to refugees and displaced individuals, helping them build new lives and integrate into their communities. These lessons also help to create a safe space for your students, and bring them sense of stability at least for an hour a week, which is really important. If you feel inspired to join, the project welcomes volunteers as language teachers or coordinators. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or suggestions. Your time, support, and empathy would be surely and truly appreciated and make a meaningful difference!