June 2011
Yakov A. Pleis at the WiOS
On June 8, Prof. Dr. Yakov A. Pleis, Head of the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Finance Academy under the Government of the Russian Federation (Moscow), gave a speech on "The transformation of Russia's elite during the past 20 years", sponsored by the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation (Moscow). Differentiating several stages of transformation of Russia's political elite, he characterized a number of problems every country faces on the way from autocracy to democracy.

June 2011
Guests from Russia at the OEI
On 29 June 2011, a delegation of the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library under the leadership of Deputy Director General, V. N. Fomin, visited the library of the OEI. Located in St. Petersburg, the library is one of three national libraries especially devoted to the digitization of cultural heritage of Russia. Subjects of the talks between the librarians were future cooperations and an intensive professional dialogue. The guests were
particularly interested in the Amburger database on foreigners in pre-revolutionary Russia.

May 2011
Inna Datsyuk at the OEI
Dr. Inna Datsyuk, National Academy of Science of Ukraine, Institute of History of Ukraine, currently stays at the OEI for continuing her studies in the field of church history. She works together with the OEI-History Department and focuses on the topic of the relations between the NS-occupational power and the catholic churches in Ukraine during World War II.

May 2011
Yulia Vymyatnina as Visiting Fellow at the OEI
Yulia Vymyatnina is a professor at the Department of Economics of the European University at St. Petersburg (Russia). Her research interests are in macroeconomic (especially monetary) policy, income distribution and its influence on growth, and macroeconometric modelling. Her work (with co-authors) has been published recently in Economic Modelling and presented at, e.g. 42nd Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies in Los Angeles. At the OEI, she works with Ekaterina Selezneva on interrelations between income, education and health in Russia.

March 2011
Philippe Van Kerm as Visiting Fellow at the OEI
Philippe Van Kerm is an economist at CEPS/INSTEAD (Luxembourg). His research interests are in the micro-econometric analysis of labor and welfare, with particular reference to income mobility and income distribution dynamics, inequality and discrimination measurement. He is keen on dealing with computing issues and inference. Some of his work appeared recently in Demography, Economica, Oxford Economic Papers. He worked at OEI with Ekaterina Selezneva on measures of inequality-adjusted wage differentials in East and West Germany.

February 2011
Evžen Kočenda as Visiting Fellow at the OEI
During February, Professor Evžen Kočenda (CERGE, Charles University Prague) was a Visiting Fellow at the OEI. Evžen Kočenda is affiliated with the William Davidson Institute, CEPR, EABCN, and has been an OEI Research Fellow since 2010. His main areas of research include applied econometrics and European integration. At the OEI he worked on gravity approaches to analyse economic and financial impacts of East-West trade and FDI, together with Richard Frensch (OEI) and Stephan Huber (IAAEG Trier und OEI). On February 22 he gave a presentation on "Efficiency and Ownership of Czech Firms".

January 2011
Alisher Aldashev as visiting fellow at the OEI
In January 2011 Dr. Alisher Aldashev from Kazakh-British Technical University, Almaty came for a Research Visit to the Osteuropa Institut. Having completed his master studies at KIMEP in 2002, Almaty, Alisher Aldashev went to the University of Regensburg as a PhD student. From 2006 till 2009 he worked for ZEW, Mannheim. Since 2009 Dr. Alisher Aldashev has been Assistant Professor at the International School of Economics, a joint program between Kazakh-British Technical University and the London School of Economics. His research interests lie in the area of empirical labor economics, especially in the field of regional mobility and migration. He published papers on these topics in Labour Economics and International Regional Science Review.