Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Higher education cuts the risk of poverty by more than half, according to  Alina Pishnyak  and  Daria Popova , leading researchers at the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards. Their findings reveal that the household incomes of families where all adults are university-educated stand at 20% above the average, and conversely, in families where none of the adults hold a degree, living standards tend to be below average by a quarter.

Age boundaries are diminishing fast and do not influence people’s lives as much as before. Nevertheless, age remains an important factor in social interaction. Age self-identification for women is closely related to their appearances, which is why beauty remains one of the main self-investment projects for women. These are the conclusions drawn by researchers from the HSE Centre for Youth Studies (CYS) in St. Petersburg as part of a project entitled ‘Age under Construction: Age Construction by Girls and Young Women’.

of parents believe that the content of tests can prevent their children from passing the BSE (Basic State Exam) after the 9th grade. 

Free legal services are generally available in Russia, but their quality varies widely. Court-appointed lawyers tend to be less knowledgeable and competent than those who offer their services pro bono for reasons such as social responsibility or professional reputation, according to a study by Anton Kazun, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development.

Research on game theory has a strong history in Russia, and this year’s opening of the new HSE International Laboratory for Game Theory and Decision-Making in St. Petersburg will only help it grow stronger. Leading the laboratory, which will include researchers from the St. Petersburg Institute for Economics and Mathematics, will be Herve Moulin, Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. Prof. Moulin is a scholar who is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division.

is the amount by which defence spending is reduced around the world for every additional one billion dollars traded between Russia and the United States. 

of Russian students intend to move to a different Russian city following university graduation.

The politicization and commercialization of health issues in today’s Western culture have led to growing healthism – a peremptory idea of self-preserving behaviour. This approach criticizes everything that fails to fit into the glamorous standards of a beautiful, young and slim body. In extreme forms, healthism is close to eugenics, which selects a ‘correct’ heredity. But even simple concerns about the ‘standards’ of physical condition may provoke hypercorrection, such as surgery on a healthy body, said Evgenia Golman, lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences Department of General Sociology, in her article published in the Journal of Social Policy Studies.