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Only data from developed countries were used to estimate the sexual orientation difference in wages. This paper is the first, which aims to identify the wage discrimination of gay men in Russia – a country where institutional discrimination and ignorance against gay men are known to present.

Gays are identified as men who reported having sex with other men in several waves of the national household survey. A wage equation is used to estimate the gay wage penalty. Extending the wage equation to implement a difference-in-difference design, the paper also evaluates the effect of the gay-propaganda law of 2013 on gay wages.

No wage discrimination is identified. The law also has no adverse effect on gay wages.

Cross-country comparison and theoretical generalizations are premature, and better identification strategies are needed to understand sexual orientation differences.

Policymakers should be aware that in both discriminatory and equitable environments, there may be hidden inequality even if researchers do not detect it.

The findings are implausible and add to existing evidence that gay discrimination measured with wage equation suffers from endogeneity and should be interpreted with caution. Particular caution should be exercised in cross-sectional and time-series comparisons, as a tendency to report the orientation honestly and unobserved confounders vary by location and time.

This chapter sheds light on long-term trends in the level and structural dynamics of investments in Russian human capital formation from government, corporations, and households. It contributes to the literature discussing theoretical issues and empirical patterns of modernization, human development, as well as the transition from a centralized to a market economy. The empirical evidence is based on extensive utilization of the dataset introduced in Didenko, Földvári, and Van Leeuwen (2013). Our findings provide support for the view expressed in Gerschenkron (1962) that in late industrializers the government tended to substitute for the lack of capital and infrastructure by direct interventions. At least from the late nineteenth century the central government's and local authorities' budgets played the primary role. However, the role of nongovernment sources increased significantly since the mid-1950s, i.e., after the crucial breakthrough to an industrial society had been made. During the transition to a market economy in the 1990s and 2000s the level of government contributions decreased somewhat in education, and more significantly in research and development, but its share in overall financing expanded. In education corporate funds were largely replaced by those from households. In health care, Russia is characterized by an increasing share of out-of-pocket payments of households and slow development of organized forms of nonstate financing. These trends reinforce obstacles to Russia's future transition, as regards institutional change toward a more significant and sound role of the corporate sector in such branches as R&D, health care, and, to a lesser extent, education.

The Sport Database is one of the most deservedly popular information tools in the field of physical activity and sport. One reason for its popularity is that the documents contained in it are received from throughout the world. But, as often happens, our deficiencies are the consequence of our merits. Precisely this wide geographical scope and the database's constant growth, combined with the isolation of indexers and the weak coordination of their work, can make problems for the database's constructors as well as users. Under such circumstances the quality of its main indexing and searching instrument — the Sport Thesaurus — acquires great significance. It must be noted that this tool exists both in printed form (Sport Thesaurus 1994 Edition) and on optical disc (Sport Discus 1975‐June 1995), and the differences between these two versions of the same thing are often substantial. One would like to hope that their constant improvement is the main reason for this situation, but some examples make one doubt it. From now on the printed version will be called ‘edition’ and the CDROM version ‘disc’. The insertion of the huge database SIRLS into the Sport Database, which took place some time ago without changing the database's specific indexing, was taken into account in all calculations. In this paper I want not only to analyse some basic deficiencies of this thesaurus and to trace their manifestations in the database, but to propose some ways it could be improved. I hope that they will be helpful for the users of the Sport Database as well as other databases on optical discs.

In the Soviet Union, the official command structure for economic production and distribution gave rise to, and depended upon, what has been described as a “shadow” economy. In the post‐socialist context, the unregulated, often extra‐legal activities of production and exchange, encompassing the survival strategies of the poor, the emergence of post‐socialist “Mafias”, and much entrepreneurial activity, has been described using the concept of the “informal economy”.

The paper is based on long‐term participatory research over a period of three years.

The paper argues that what we might think of as informal economic activity in Uzbekistan cannot be understood in relation to a formal economy, but is rather an expression of a more general informalisation of lifeworlds following the end of the Soviet Union. Unlike the situation in the Soviet Union, the informal does not emerge from and exist in relation to formal political and economic structures. The state itself is experienced in personalised terms, as a “Mafia”, and the informal is all that there is.

This article provides an original perspective on the informal economy and informalised lifeworlds in Uzbekistan.