Research & Expertise news at HSE University

‘The Tragedy of Inequality: Dehumanizing the “Total Human”’ was the dramatic title of a recent seminar held by the HSE Institute of Education. Inequality leads to marginalization of specific individuals and groups. The availability of high-quality education may help decrease the problem.

Aleksei Smirnov, Assistant Professor, HSE University Faculty of Economic Sciences, and Egor Starkov, Assistant Professor, University of Copenhagen, have constructed a mathematical model that explains why it is advantageous for sellers not to delete negative reviews of their products. A study detailing this conclusion has been accepted for publication in The American Economic Journal: Microeconomics.

Social class does not strongly influence the kind of alcohol Russians drink. Gender, age, education and place of residence are more important. For example, young people prefer beer, wines are primarily popular among women, and ‘moonshine in combination with other drinks’ are mainly consumed by the older age groups. This was the conclusion reached by HSE University researchers.

An applied research project being carried out by the HSE Laboratory for Economics of Climate Change uses the example of the Chechen Republic and the mountainous areas of Krasnodar Krai to create a model of climate risk evaluation and management for Russian regions. Laboratory heads Igor Makarov and Ilya Stepanov talk about the threats presented by global climate change, about whether the pandemic will slow it down, and why a multifaceted approach is essential.

Researchers at HSE and Lomonosov Moscow State University analyzed data on Russians’ movements during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Their analysis showed that residents of lower-income municipalities self-isolated less compared to residents of higher-income cities. The findings were published in the journal Environment and Planning A.

Students need digital skills, both in life and in their future work. But many universities are not yet ready to provide students with them, despite the current circumstances in which universities have had to transition to online learning due to the COVID-19 epidemic. The development of online formats has been uneven: there are bright leaders and the rest modestly ‘stand aside’. They lack resources, confidence in digital education, and a regulatory framework. At the eSTARS International Conference organised by HSE University in partnership with Coursera, experts discussed the challenges of digitalisation in higher education.

Online learning for schoolchildren — a temporary solution authorities have implemented due to the COVID-19 epidemic — has generated a lot of heated debate. Families worry about the quality and outcomes of online learning, and teachers worry about the excessive workload. School heads have their own headache about how to organise the remote learning. A year has passed since the start of the pandemic, and students have been attending their classes online since March — it is already possible to take stock and look at the situation in a comprehensive and impartial manner, which is what a team of HSE researchers has done. Here are the main results of their study and their proposed solutions to the most pressing problems.

Mikhail Guschin, Research Fellow at the HSE University Laboratory of Methods for Big Data Analysis of the Faculty of Computer Science, was appointed coordinator of the machine learning and statistics working group in the LHCb Large Hadron Collider experiment at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). He will be the only representative of a Russian University among the coordinators for the experiment’s working groups.