While being single or married does not usually make much difference in terms of life satisfaction for younger people, single individuals tend to feel less happy as they age, particularly at certain moments of their lives, and most single people experience a peak of unhappiness once they retire, according to Anna Shirokanova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research in St. Petersburg.

Far from being passive, Muscovites – at least more than half of them – are more likely than residents of other Russian cities to join together with others in pursuit of a common cause, engage in civic campaigns online, and trust other people and non-profit organizations (NGOs). While in terms of offline civic engagement Muscovites do not differ much from the rest of the country, their activity can be encouraged by creating an appropriate infrastructure, according to Irina Mersiyanova, Director of the HSE Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Non-Profit Sector, and Irina Korneeva, Research Fellow of the same Centre.

Women who have moved to another part of the country tend to have higher fertility than those who stay in the same community all their lives. Relocation often improves a woman's life circumstances and broadens her choice of marriage partner, thus supporting her reproductive intentions, according to Svetlana Biryukova, Senior Research Fellow of the HSE Center for Studies of Income and Living Standards, and Alla Tyndik, Leading Research Fellow at the RANEPA.

Investment banks tend to give fairly accurate advice to stock market participants – particularly when it comes to stock in industries such as metallurgy, mechanical engineering, transport and construction, according to the paper 'Analysis of Conflicts and Determinants of Accuracy of Forecasts in Russian Financial Analysts’ Recommendations', authored by a group of researchers of the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences.

Employees who are too focused on sales targets can ignore customer needs. Meanwhile, customer focus is emerging as a key trend in business management. Ksenia Klepneva, postgraduate student of the HSE School of Business Administration, examined factors contributing to customer focus in companies operating in developed and developing economies.

Shadow education for high school students, such as private tutors or preparatory courses, is often treated by families as a mega-project requiring substantial investments of money and effort. Such investments, however, rarely pay off for underachieving students who are often unaware of the quality of shadow education and thus may choose the wrong providers. A study by Andrey Zakharov, Deputy Head of the HSE Institute of Education’s International Laboratory for Education Policy Analysis, and Prashant Loyalka, leading research fellow of the same Institute, has debunked some of the more popular myths concerning the effect of shadow education.

Public misperceptions of inequality; Sanctions hit the best companies; How high is mortality in Russia?; How the type of university affects graduates' salaries; What national pride means; Muslims sharing a Protestant ethic; Economic inactivity among Russians; Russian travellers reluctant to book hotels online; The right to be forgotten; and Analysts can be wrong – these were the HSE's most interesting research papers in 2015, according to Opec.ru.

Many people in Russia know about the Dima Rogachev Centre – particularly those who have faced the challenge of child cancer. The centre is Europe's largest pediatric cancer care facility and is named after a boy with advanced cancer who wrote a letter to President Putin inviting him to visit; the invitation was accepted, and after the visit, the decision was made to build a state-of-the-art Centre for Pediatric Hematology, Oncology and Immunology, based in the Research Institute of Pediatric Hematology. The new centre was named after Dmitry 'Dima' Rogachev who died two years later at the age of 12 while the centre was still under construction.

Increased trade turnover by online retailers is inextricably linked to customers’ having a positive view of them. Paying attention to your customers, being honest in your dealings with them, as well as offering discounts and bonus programmes can all increase the number of both regular and new customers for online retailers, Associate Professor in the Marketing Department Elena Panteleeva and postgraduate student Natalia Mikhailova found in their research ‘Consumer Experience in e-Commerce: Analyzing Rational and Emotional Consumer Insights’.

Mortgage borrowers who have unconfirmed income turn out to be unable to repay the loan less often than public officials, whose income consists of their official salary only. The probability of loan default is also considerably influenced by the cost of the loan. These were the findings of a study conducted by Alexander Karminsky, HSE Professor, and Agata Lozinskaya, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE campus in Perm.

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.