Research & Expertise

An international team of scholars studied how the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Europeans’ stress levels and their trust in their national governments and the healthcare systems. They found that respondents were most stressed by the state of the national economy, and only after that, by the risk of catching COVID-19 and possibly being hospitalized. In Western Europe, people trust their governments more than in other EU countries. The results of the study were published in Royal Society Open Science.

On average, women in Russia earn 30-35% less than men. According to this indicator, Russia is ahead of many developed countries. The difference in earnings is primarily associated with the uneven distribution of men and women in different industries and professions, but economists cannot explain a significant portion of the discrepancy. Aleksey Oshchepkov, Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at HSE University, came to these conclusions after analyzing research materials and survey data. The results are published in a chapter of the volume, Gendering Post-Soviet Space, recently published by Springer.

Social isolation and limited interaction with other people during the COVID-19 pandemic have had adverse impact on the mental and physical health of Russian students. These are the findings of a survey conducted by HSE University and the Centre of Cross-Cultural Psychology and Ethology of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS).

Specialists at the HSE Institute of Education found that the willingness of children to work independently at home during distance learning depended not only on the availability of appropriate technical means in the family (its socio-economic profile), but also on the nature of their parents’ work (a socio-psychological factor).

HSE University researchers have become the first in the world to discover genetic predisposition to severe COVID-19. The results of the study were published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.

Children from families with high incomes and whose parents hold university degrees have a better chance of going to university. Parental involvement in the education process, however, does not have an impact on the decrease in equal access to higher education for students. This was the conclusion reached by experts from HSE University’s Center for Institutional Studies.

Those who consider themselves healthy will be more willing to comply with COVID restrictions if they believe, according to their own estimations, that the expected losses from the disease will be significant, suggest researchers of the Faculty of Economic Sciences at HSE University.

A team of scientists, with the first author from the HSE University, were investigating which factors are the most important for the upper limb motor recovery after a stroke. The study is published in Stroke, the world's leading journal for cerebrovascular pathology.