Research & Expertise news at HSE University

On September 20-21, the Perm campus of the Higher School of Economics hosted the sixth International Conference on Applied Research in Economics (iCare6), an event that focuses on research with applications to and implications for real-life problems. The conference acronym reflects its motto: iCare = I care.

Demographers have created a detailed colour map of population ageing in European countries; a collection of demographic stories, it uses colour coding to indicate the varying stages of population ageing across Europe. By looking at the map, you can easily spot areas with a higher concentration of older people, countries with the youngest populations and the main destinations for workforce flows. The map's author Ilya Kashnitsky comments on some of the demographic stories it tells.   

'In fact, the Russian language is very logical and my task is to disclose this to my students', says Alevtina Iagodova who has been teaching Russian for over 20 years. At HSE University – St. Petersburg she gives Russian classes to exchange students, organizes a language club, and promotes the Russian culture awareness among foreigners. Recently, she has been invited by the University of Indonesia to lead a workshop in order to share her knowledge and experience of teaching Russian as a foreign language with the local colleagues.

An international group of researchers (the first author is Nikita Kalinin, HSE Saint-Petersburg, the last author is Ernesto Lupercio, CINVESTAV, Mexico) has presented the first continuous model describing self-organised criticality. The proposed solution is simpler and more universal than the classical sandpile model: it integrates areas as remote from one another as economics, developmental biology and gravity in the context of tropical geometry. The paper was published in PNAS.

The Institute of Education at HSE has signed an agreement outlining collaboration with the online platform, GlobalLab - a community of teachers and students who work on joint research projects over the Internet.

This summer, the HSE-Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development opened a new division - the BRICS Antimonopoly Centre. It will engage in applied research and expert analysis aimed at improving competition policies and strengthening antitrust regulation in the BRICS economies. The Centre will also coordinate the activities of the BRICS member states’ competition authorities and scientific communities.

Researchers from the Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg State University, and the University of Potsdam have created the first ever database comprised of eye-tracking data collected during reading in Russian. The results are openly available and can be used not only in linguistics, but also in the diagnosis and correction of speech disorders, for example. The research was published in the journal Behavior Research Methods.

145 researchers from 30 countries discussed how higher education systems work on global and national levels, and how they are influenced by the processes of differentiation and integration.