Research & Expertise news at HSE University

Free legal services are generally available in Russia, but their quality varies widely. Court-appointed lawyers tend to be less knowledgeable and competent than those who offer their services pro bono for reasons such as social responsibility or professional reputation, according to a study by Anton Kazun, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development.

Research on game theory has a strong history in Russia, and this year’s opening of the new HSE International Laboratory for Game Theory and Decision-Making in St. Petersburg will only help it grow stronger. Leading the laboratory, which will include researchers from the St. Petersburg Institute for Economics and Mathematics, will be Herve Moulin, Donald J. Robertson Chair of Economics at the Adam Smith Business School at the University of Glasgow. Prof. Moulin is a scholar who is known for his research contributions in mathematical economics, in particular in the fields of mechanism design, social choice, game theory and fair division.

is the amount by which defence spending is reduced around the world for every additional one billion dollars traded between Russia and the United States. 

of Russian students intend to move to a different Russian city following university graduation.

The politicization and commercialization of health issues in today’s Western culture have led to growing healthism – a peremptory idea of self-preserving behaviour. This approach criticizes everything that fails to fit into the glamorous standards of a beautiful, young and slim body. In extreme forms, healthism is close to eugenics, which selects a ‘correct’ heredity. But even simple concerns about the ‘standards’ of physical condition may provoke hypercorrection, such as surgery on a healthy body, said Evgenia Golman, lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences Department of General Sociology, in her article published in the Journal of Social Policy Studies.

Claudio Silva, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Polytechnic School of Engineering, New York University visited Moscow to take part in the Graduate School of Urban Studies and Planning summer programme, Adaptive City. Professor Silva is a specialist in computer technology and big data. He works on interdisciplinary projects involving biotechnology, neurobiology, physics, ornithology, sports analysis, urban changes and others. Silva has been a major influence on researchers working in big data, for one thing, because of his determination to close the gap between academic research and practical applications.   

Challenging traditional explanations of history and taking a new view on the past is the hallmark of a good historian; re-examining the history of post-war Soviet agriculture and economics is no exception, according to Aaron Hale-Dorrell, who recently received his PhD in History from the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and will begin a post-doctoral fellowship at the HSE International Centre for the History and Sociology of World War II and Its Consequences in September. Aaron Hale-Dorrell recently agreed to speak with the HSE news service about his research interests, his plans while at HSE, and his experiences living and working in Russia.

Over the next 20 years, death rates among working age Russian men are expected to drop by a third due to a change in alcohol consumption preferences – namely, the decreasing popularity of vodka, according to Yevgeny Yakovlev, Assistant Professor at the HSE Department of Applied Economics, and Lorenz Kueng, Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.