Research & Expertise News at HSE University

Economists from HSE University and the Southern Federal University have found that personality traits such as conscientiousness and open-mindedness help schoolchildren improve their academic performance. The study, conducted across seven countries, was the first large-scale international analysis of the impact of character traits on the academic achievement of 10 and 15-year-olds. The findings have been published in the International Journal of Educational Research.

In today's issue of Schola, Mariya Molodchik, Senior Research Fellow at the International Laboratory of Intangible-Driven Economy and Professor at the School of Economics and Finance at HSE University’s Campus in Perm, discusses a joint project with Iran University of Science and Technology, titled 'Internationalization of Companies from Developing Countries: The Role of Intellectual Resources in Response to Exogenous Shocks.'

On September 17–20, 2025, the First Caucasus School on Experimental Research and Cognitive Sciences took place at the Gornaya Legenda venue of Adyghe State University (ASU). The event was organised by the ASU Experimental Linguistics Laboratory, the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, and the HSE Centre for Sociocultural and Ethnolinguistic Studies. The school brought together over 50 participants—students, doctoral candidates, and early-career researchers from across Russia, along with lecturers and speakers from France, Serbia, China, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.

The first Intervision song contest recently came to an end in Moscow. The winner was the Vietnamese entrant, Đức Phúc. The voting system for the contest was developed by Fuad Aleskerov, a renowned mathematician, expert in game theory and decision-making, and Distinguished Professor at HSE University. He shared the details with the HSE News Service.

Alexander Sorokin, Dean of the School of Social Sciences at HSE University–St Petersburg, was a key speaker at the Himalaya Calling global summit at UPES University in India.

On September 15–16, 2025, the HSE Centre of Classical and Oriental Archaeology at the Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies, Faculty of Humanities, held an international conference marking the fifth anniversary of excavations carried out by HSE archaeologists as part of the Parion Mission of Ondokuz Mayıs University, Samsun, at the agora of Parion.

Researchers from the MECO international project, including experts from the HSE Centre for Language and Brain, have developed a tool for analysing data on English text reading by native speakers of more than 19 languages. In a large-scale experiment involving over 1,200 people, researchers recorded participants’ eye movements as they silently read the same English texts and then assessed their level of comprehension. The results showed that even when comprehension levels were the same, the reading process—such as gaze fixations, rereading, and word skipping—varied depending on the reader's native language and their English proficiency. The study has been published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition.

Having a mortgage increases the likelihood that a Russian family will plan to have a child within the next three years by 39 percentage points. This is the conclusion of a study by Prof. Elena Vakulenko and doctoral student Rufina Evgrafova from the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences. The authors emphasise that this effect is most pronounced among women, people under 36, and those without children. The study findings have been published in Voprosy Ekonomiki.