Research & Expertise

On February 1, the HSE Cultural Centre hosted an award ceremony for the winners and laureates of the 2022 Student Research Paper Competition. Participants included students and graduates of HSE University and other universities. The ceremony closed with a ‘Science Battles’ event.

The HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences and the School of Economics at Shanghai University have co-organised the First Sino-Russian Workshop on ‘Economic Performance from Regional Aspects’. The researchers discussed how they detected and assessed the effects of different economic policies in Russia and China at a regional level.

Sino-Russian Economic Cooperation Workshop "Economic Performance from Regional Aspects" organized by the HSE University Centre for Spatial Econometrics in Applied Macroeconomic Research and the Shanghai University School of Economics to be held on 5th November 2022 at 3 pm Shanghai time, 10 am Moscow time

Academics’ work week became even longer during the pandemic. This is true of researchers from different countries, independently of their gender and specialisation, an international research team with HSE University participation found. Their working time during the pandemic was 51 hours compared to the usual 40. The increased number of working hours per week seems to have become part of the new academic norm. The results of the study were published in the Plos One journal.

Rapidly changing approaches to the pursuit of scientific knowledge are making research more interdisciplinary in nature. Science and researchers are now more open to society, while student academic mobility among universities is encouraged. Maria Yudkevich, HSE Vice Rector, talks about these issues, explaining how HSE University promotes and expands its research activities and supports early-career researchers.

After analysing the price fluctuations of almost 2,000 cryptocurrencies over seven years, Victoria Dobrynskaya, Associate Professor at the HSE University Faculty of Economic Sciences, found that there are no fundamental differences between their behaviour and that of conventional assets. Cryptocurrency follows the same principles, although its prices change much faster: processes that usually take years on traditional markets take only a month or so on the cryptocurrency market. An article on this research was reprinted by SSRN.

Economists from HSE University have demonstrated that collecting as much information as possible about borrowers does not always decrease banks’ risks. Sometimes, more is not better: on the contrary, increasing the volume of data might increase the risks of loan defaults to a certain extent. The study was published in the WP BRP HSE University, Series: Financial Economics series of working papers.

People with higher education enjoy higher salaries and are at considerably less risk of unemployment. The World Bank estimates that an extra year of university studies in Russia yields an 8% return on investment. The quality of a university, the specific field of study, and students’ individual strategies are all key factors in ensuring success in the labour market. These topics were discussed by Viktor Rudakov, Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Head of the International Laboratory for Institutional Analysis of Economic Reforms, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences, HSE University, in an open lecture on ‘How and Where to Study to Become Successful in the Labour Market’.

On average, women in Russia earn 30-35% less than men. According to this indicator, Russia is ahead of many developed countries. The difference in earnings is primarily associated with the uneven distribution of men and women in different industries and professions, but economists cannot explain a significant portion of the discrepancy. Aleksey Oshchepkov, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at HSE University, came to these conclusions after analyzing research materials and survey data. The results are published in a chapter of the volume, Gendering Post-Soviet Space, recently published by Springer.