Research & Expertise news at HSE University

On August 30th and 31st, the Higher School of Economics is hosting the first international workshop on the neurobiology of social influence. The event is being organised by the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making.

could be the percentage by which GDP falls for the year. By way of comparison, in 1998, the decline in GDP was 5.3%

A predominance of women on a company's boards of directors can lead to a loss of flexibility in governance. Yet in times of change, for example during periods of rapid growth or crisis, women can make better leaders than men: they are more willing to take risks and tend to find more unconventional solutions, according to a report 'The Impact of Gender Diversity of the Board and Ownership Structure on Corporate Performance: Evidence from Western Europe' by HSE researchers Tatiana Ratnikova and Dmitry Gavrilov.

ICEF 2006 alumnus Yuri Kiselev is now head of debt capital markets in Russia and the CIS at Société Générale. In an interview for the ICEF website Yuri talked about his career and education in Russia and abroad.

Social workers tend to believe that society underestimates the complexity of their mission and fails to fully appreciate the gift of caring and compassion that they offer their clients. Experts warn that social work may lead to burnout, unless practitioners are taught the skills of managing their emotions in dealing with clients and equipped with standard algorithms facilitating their 'emotional work' and thus helping to alleviate stress, according to Olga Simonova, Deputy Head of the HSE Department of General Sociology.

There is not a single country in the world where all people share the same system of values. Every society has members focused on serving others as well as those who value personal achievement above all and rely only on themselves. Independent altruists committed to helping others, yet expecting nothing in return, are relatively rare in all European countries, particularly in post-Soviet countries, where their proportion is among the smallest, according to Vladimir Magun and Maksim Rudnev of the HSE's Laboratory for Comparative Studies in Mass Consciousness.

Christian Frohlich has been a Research Fellow at the Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Non-Profit Sector since 2014. This year he is being fast tracked for tenure in the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences in the School of Sociology. Dr Frohlich has a DPhil in Sociology from Leipzig University, Germany. He spoke to HSE English News about his research into civic activism in Russia and about why he likes living and working in Moscow.

Russian businesses have been slow in adopting new media tools. Many companies continue to rely on official websites to reach out to customers and avoid using social media and blogs, as they are not ready for an equal dialogue with external audiences, according to Iosif Dzyaloshinsky and Maria Pilgun, professors of the HSE Faculty of Communication, Media and Design.