Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Countries with reserve currencies, sufficient fiscal capacity to implement soft fiscal policies, and access to global capital markets have the best chance of recovering from the coronavirus crisis. The rest may need external assistance. These are the conclusions drawn by Alexei Kireyev, leading IMF economist and visiting professor at HSE University’s School of World Economy.

Middle-class Russians are more likely to reduce spending on the development of their own human capital and prioritize investing in their children instead, particularly when it comes to their children’s education. This is evidenced by a study conducted by the Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards of HSE University.

Researchers Yulia Chilipenok, Olga Gaponova, Nadezhda Gaponova and Lyubov Danilova of HSE – Nizhny Novgorod looked at how the lockdown has impacted Russian women during the COVID-19 pandemic. They studied the following questions: how women divided their time; how they worked from home; how they got on with their partners and children; and how they dropped old habits and started new ones in relation to nutrition, health, beauty, and self-development.

The idea for the project, which studies the crisis experience, was born at HSE University’s Faculty of World Economy and International Affairs last spring, when it became clear that the pandemic and lockdown had given rise to a new systemic crisis, based on numerous contradictions that have accumulated in the world over the past decades. The results of the scientific Lessons from the Crises of the Past project have been presented to the portal's news service by Igor Makarov, Head of HSE University’s School of World Economy.

In Russia, 43.1% of the adult population experiences loneliness. This share is comprised mostly of older people, but quite often young people as well. At each age, loneliness is experienced in its own way, and at certain times it becomes especially painful.

Whether we like it or not, talking with a robot on the phone is now part of our everyday lives. What is the right way to respond to a mechanical voice, who should we blame when communication fails, and could AI make an ideal conversationalist? HSE sociologist Alisa Maksimova answers these questions and more, based on findings from her study of interactions between humans and robots presented in the book Adventures in Technology: Barriers to Digitalisation in Russia.

On January 14, at the 2021 Gaidar Forum, which was held at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), HSE University Rector Yaroslav Kuzminov and leaders of three other institutions signed an agreement to establish the Human Capital Multidisciplinary Research Center (HCMRC). The other co-signers were RANEPA Rector Vladimir Mau, MGIMO University Rector Anatoly Torkunov, and Dmitry Funk, Director of the N.N. Miklukho-Maclay Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Center will focus on that key areas of human capital studies that are of current global importance.

The paper by Yury Budkov, Professor at HSE MIEM School of Applied Mathematics, co-authored with Andrey Kolesnikov from Leipzig University, was initially published by a Russian journal, Polymer Science. Its English version was published by SpringerLink, where it generated considerable interest among visitors.