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.

Personal experience is a critical factor in the choice of destination for labour migration. Being familiar with the local language and laws and having local contacts matter more for potential migrants than the current economic situation in the target region, according to Evgenia Chernina, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies.

The likelihood of being denied a visa depends on the quality of institutions in the applicant's country – such as public administration, corruption response, rule of law, and prevalent norms and values. The same factors play a role in whether residents of a particular country are likely to be granted visa-free entry, according to the study 'Institutions and Visa Regimes' by HSE researchers Kamila Gracheva, Leonid Polischuk, Alexander Yarkin, and Kong Schoors from the University of Ghent, Belgium.

The ability to foresee stock market trends and the potential performance of specific financial instruments is key to a stock trader’s success. Yet studies show that both traders and financial analysts often make mistakes. Lyudmila Egorova, Junior Research Fellow of the HSE International Laboratory of Decision Choice and Analysis, applied mathematical methods to calculate which strategies can help brokers make a profit and avoid bankruptcy.

While helping build consumer trust in credit institutions, deposit insurance can prompt bankers to engage in risky and opportunistic behaviour; larger banks tend to be more cautious and do a better job managing troubled assets, according to Natalia Gorelaya, Associate Professor at the HSE Faculty of Economic Sciences’ Department of Finance.