On February 14, Prof. Muhammad Asali delivered a research seminar and presented his work on the relationship between the labor market and the healthiness of the economy. The paper, entitled “Labor Market Discrimination and the Macroeconomy,” which is a joint work with his former student Ms. Rusudan Gurashvili, aimed at measuring and documenting the discriminatory wage gaps in Georgia within gender and ethnic dimensions.

ISET would like to congratulate resident faculty members Muhammad Asali, Norberto Pignatti, and Sophiko Skhirtladze on the publication of their new article, entitled “Employment discrimination in the former Soviet Union Republic: Evidence from a field experiment” and published in the Journal of Comparative Economics.

It all started with a simple exercise for my Master’s project in which I tried to understand the underlying causes of the observed wage gap between ethnic Georgians and ethnic minorities in the country. After more than a decade, a reputable international journal has published a paper reporting on the experimental evidence my colleagues and I collected and analyzed on labor market outcomes for ethnic minority and female citizens of Georgia.

On October 18, in collaboration with the National Bank of Georgia and the Administration of the Georgian President, the ISET Policy Institute hosted a presentation about the effectiveness of the “School-Bank” project, which continued with a round table discussion about financial literacy in Georgia.

October 15-17 2018, Salome Gelashvili and Pati Mamardashvili from the APRC traveled to Switzerland to participate in a kick-off meeting of the collaboration between APRC and the School of Agricultural, Forest, and Food Sciences (HAFL) at the Bern University of Applied Science.