Research & Expertise

Bernardo Pincheira is a Research Fellow at the International Research Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms, Center for Institutional Studies. Having graduated from the University of Nottingham with a PhD in Economics, Dr. Pincheira shared his interest in Economics of Education and peer effects in the classroom.

The HSE Look is glad to present the second part of the interview with Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov, originally taken by our flagship bulletin Okna Rosta. This part focuses on new educational tools as well as old traditions, on cooperation with regional universities and the transformations to be achieved in the upcoming decade.

HSE researches have shown that the 2010 happiness level of citizens from Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and other Arab countries could provide a much more accurate forecast of the Arab Spring events than purely economic indices, such as GDP per capita and unemployment rate.

IQ.HSE continues the tradition of saying goodbye to the old year in figures. Below are 19 facts from the HSE University research that we shared in 2019.

In early December 2019, HSE University welcomed Onur Güntürkün from Ruhr-University Bochum, a leading expert in studies of thinking, to deliver a lecture entitled ‘Cognition without a Cortex.’ Among other things, Onur Güntürkün is known for demonstrating that magpies pass the mirror test, i.e., recognize themselves in a mirror. IQ.HSE attended Prof. Güntürkün’ lecture, which was organized with the support of the German Research Foundation, DFG, and asked him several questions about the problem of thinking, and why cleaner fish turned out to be ‘smarter’ than octopi.

Although a growing number of Russians now exercise regularly, the overall figure remains low — only one-fourth of working women and less than one-third of working men are physically active. Are Russians just lazy or are gym memberships too expensive for them? What can stimulate people to adopt a more active lifestyle, and is Russia up to international standards in this regard? Find the answers in a newly released study from HSE University. IQ.HSE selected 10 of the most interesting facts from that research.

Ekaterina Melianova and Artyom Volgin, second-year students of the Master’s programme ‘Applied Statistics with Network Analysis’, took second place in an international data analysis competition. Using a Kaggle survey of 19,717 respondents from 171 countries, they analyzed the community of PhD degree holders in Data Science.

HSE University hosted a Russian-Chinese meeting on ‘Social policy as a tool for combating poverty and developing human capital’. Representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs, the World Bank, the Russian Pension Fund, the government of Tatarstan, and HSE University researchers evaluated the social policies of both countries, shared effective measures for combating and eliminating poverty.

Not everyone whose income is below the official poverty line consider themselves as outsiders. On the contrary, some of those who feel that they barely make ends meet cannot objectively be considered as abjectly poor. Sociologist Ekaterina Slobodenyuk studied both groups of poor Russians. It turned out that they have little in common, which means they need different kinds of support.

Professor Heinrich Haerke, a renowned archaeology expert, has been cooperating with HSE University researchers for a long time. This year he has joined HSE as a Professor at the recently formed Centre for Classical and Oriental Archaeology. He has talked to HSE News Service about his research interests, field projects, and teaching archaeology.