Research of Financial Infrastructure of Regions Influencing Indicators of Regional Investment Environment

The paper examines the impact of the financial infrastructure of regions on the regional investment environment. Integral indicators that characterize the production and consumer potential, the level of innovation and business activity, financial development and investment risk have been formed by Generalized method of moments (GMM). Mixed effect (or multilevel, hierarchical) model allowed us to obtain individual estimates of the financial infrastructure index for individual groups of objects: for Federal districts, for clusters, depending on the prevailing type of production, and for regions. The results confirm the hypothesis about the positive impact of financial infrastructure on investment attractiveness only in the regional context, which is due to the strong socio-economic differentiation of the Russian Federation's subjects. Financial infrastructure coefficients that are specific to each Federal district are insignificant. This supports the hypothesis that the existing administrative division is not justified from an economic point of view, and the regions of the same district are very heterogeneous in economic terms. The results of the evaluation of the Arellano-Bond dynamic model allowed us to confirm the assumption that the investment effect manifests itself with a certain time lag. At the same time, the contribution of the financial infrastructure is not devalued, and the factor has a significant positive impact. The conclusions made in this paper can be used and expanded in further regional panel studies. In particular, it is of great practical interest to include additional components of investment attractiveness, for example, describing legal aspects: the availability of investment protection mechanisms, legal conditions for investment.