Tag «IQ»

The Russian family has been becoming more demographically heterogeneous over recent years. Some of the families follow the trend of having many children: women more often give birth to a third and fourth child, and the gap between births is decreasing, which makes the evolution of the family faster. At the same time, younger generations are inclined to postpone marriage and having their first child, which leads either to later motherhood or to childlessness. This means that two opposite trends are developing; along with the growing share of ‘Western-type’ families, with postponed parenthood and fewer children, there is a revival of the traditional family with more children, Sergey Zakharov, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Demography, reported.

Many management students have difficulties predicting their career paths for the next five or ten years. Some of the students obviously have big hoped for their future and are confident about rapid career growth. They believe that by 30 they will be able to become top-level managers in medium and big organizations, and will never repeat the mistakes of their principals and teachers. Svetlana Satikova, Associate Professor at the Department of Management of HSE in St. Petersburg, studied the career expectations of future managers.

While helping build consumer trust in credit institutions, deposit insurance can prompt bankers to engage in risky and opportunistic behaviour; larger banks tend to be more cautious and do a better job managing troubled assets, according to Natalia Gorelaya, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences’ Department of Finance.

In Russia, the demand for migrant workers is highest in economically developed and resource-extracting regions, in areas with low population density, and in construction and industrial companies. Employers prefer to hire low-skilled migrants with no education beyond secondary school and limited work experience of less than a year, since these workers are much cheaper than locals. These are some of the findings from a study by Elena Vakulenko, Assiant Professor at the Department of Applied Economics, HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences, and HSE student Roman Leukhin.

The level of education has a direct impact on young Russians’ chances of getting a job. Young men and women with some post-secondary education – in particular those with higher education – experience a shorter transition to their first employment and a fairly low risk of staying unemployed, while those with just nine year of compulsory secondary school – in fact, 20% of Russians under 29 – are likely to remain unemployed for prolonged periods, according to Elena Varshavskaya, professor of the HSE Department of Human Resources Management.

In the near future, the number of migrants from Central Asia coming to work in Russia will increase – particularly from Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, countries where remittances from their citizens working in Russia stand at almost half of their respective GDPs, according to a joint study by the Eurasian Development Bank (EDB), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR), and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).

Companies with decentralized management systems are, on average, more effective than firms where the CEO tries to control everything. The risk of centralization is higher if the company is managed by families. These were the main findings of the recent research by Irina Levina, research fellow at the HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies.

More than one in three Russian CEOs hold more than one academic degree, making them stand out dramatically compared to the general public. By going back to school and pursuing lifelong learning, senior executives expect to increase their knowledge, human capital and income, according to Sergey Solntsev, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE Laboratory for Labour Market Studies.