On Monday, May 18th, ISET hosted Mr. Jan Klingelhöfer from RWTH Aachen University who presented his paper titled “The Swing Voters' Blessing" to the ISET community. The paper deals with the following question: can democracy work well if the electorate is neither fully informed nor fully rational?

On Thursday, May 14th, ISET hosted Helena Schweiger, Senior Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist at the EBRD, London. Ms. Schweiger presented her recent paper “The impact of armed conflict on firms’ performance and perceptions”, co-authored with Carly Petracco. This study explores the short-run impact of the August 2008 conflict between Georgia and Russia on firms’ performance and their perceptions of the business environment.

On Tuesday, April 21st, Tornike Kadeishvili, Head of Scientific Board of Andrea Razmadze Mathematical Institute and Professor of Mathematics at ISET, gave a public lecture organized by ISET. The presentation was of “popular lecture” type, were Prof. Kadeishvili showed students how mathematics is used in modeling of economic events. More than 100 students and other interested individuals attended the lecture.

On April 17th, ISET was honored to welcome Her Excellency Ms. Maria van der Hoeven, Executive Director of International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading international institution in the energy sector. Prior to becoming Executive Director of IEA, Ms. van der Hoeven served as the Minister of Economic Affairs, the Minister of Education, Culture and Science, and a member of the parliament of the Netherlands.

On Thursday, April 16th, Muhammad Asali, ISET’s resident faculty member, presented his paper, named “Compulsory Military Service and Future Earnings: Evidence from a Quasi Experiment” to the ISET community.