Publications

The paper presents a large scale overlapping generation model with heterogeneous agents, where the household is the decision unit. We calibrate the model for three European countries – France, Italy and Sweden – which show marked differences in the design of some public programmes. We examine the properties in terms of annual and life cycle redistribution of a number of tax-benefit programmes, by studying the impact of removing from our model economies some or all of them. We find that whether one considers a life cycle or an annual horizon, and whether behavioural responses are accounted for or not, has a large impact on the results. The model may provide useful insights for policy makers on which kind of reforms are more likely to achieve specific equity objectives.

We analyze whether a depositor’s familiarity with a bank affects depositor behavior during a financial crisis. Familiarity is measured by the presence of regional or local cues in the bank’s name, while depositor behavior is considered in terms of depositor sensitivity to observable bank risk (market discipline exerted by depositors). Using the 2001–2010 bank-level and region-level data for Russia, we show the evidence that depositors use quantity-based discipline on all banks in the sample. The evidence of a price-based discipline mechanism, however, is virtually absent. We find that depositors of familiar banks were less sensitive to bank risk after a financial crisis than depositors at unfamiliar banks. To assure the results are driven by familiarity bias and not implicit support of regional governments to banks with regional cues in their names, we interact the variables with measures of trust in local governments and regional affinity. We find a “flight to familiarity” effect strongly present in regions with strong regional affinity, while the effect is rejected in regions with greater trust in regional and local governments. This suggests that the results are driven by familiarity rather than implicit protection from trusted regional or local governments.

We document the descriptive statistics and detailed regression outputs for educational attainment and measured 2D:4D ratios, based on the RLMS data (20th round, conducted in 2011–2012). Regression analysis is conducted using STATA 13, gologit2 which is a special code for the generalized ordered logit regression in STATA environment. We provide graphs of differences in means of 2D:4D ratios by educational attainment. Information about the distribution of self-identified nationalities and fields of university degrees of respondents is presented.

Based on the data of cohort longitudinal study “Educational and Career Trajectories”, factors affecting absolute and relative expected returns on education (ROE) are investigated.Surveys of Moscow students show that academic performance assessed by Unified State Exam (USE) scores is an important predictor of students’ salary expectations. Besides, expected ROE also correlates positively with college selectivity. Students in private colleges expect to be paid lower than those in state universities. Social and cultural capital of the family (parental education, number of books at home) may influence salary expectations indirectly, through academic performance. Students from wealthier families expect to have a higher ROE than their disadvantaged peers, and so do boys as compared to girls. Students working part-time expect to be paid higher than non-working students after graduation but anticipate a lower return on investment in relative terms.   Citation: Prakhov I. (2017) Determinanty ozhidaemoy otdachi ot vysshego obrazovaniya v Moskve [Determinants of Expected Return on Higher Education in Moscow]. Voprosy obrazovaniya / Educational Studies. Moscow, no1, pp. 25-57.

There are many studies revealing factors which influence the demand for financial services. However genetic features, determining the individual's overall postnatal behaviour, have not been studied within this context. This paper extends the previous literature by studying to what extent individual biological endowment, proxied by prenatal testosterone (PT, measured by the 2D:4D ratio), can determine personal demand for bank services and insurance. We use the data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) of 2011–2012. Our findings confirm the existence of the link between inherent biological variation and financial inclusion: PT affects the use of bank cards, intention to borrow from a bank, having a bank deposit and the consumption of insurance products.

In an interconnected and globally competitive environment, faculty mobility across countries has become widespread, yet is little understood. Grounded in qualitative methodology, this volume offers a cutting-edge examination of internationally mobile academics today and explores the approaches and strategies that institutions pursue to recruit and integrate international teachers and scholars into local universities. Providing a range of research-based insights from case studies in key countries, this resource offers higher education scholars and administrators a comparative perspective, helping to explain the impact that international faculty have on the local university, as well as issues of retention, promotion, salaries, and the challenges faced by these internationally mobile academics.

This article aims to analyze the psychometric properties of the Russian version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-9) by using a sample of 1783 employees of a large Russian organization. We conducted a series of Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) tests of the factorial structure and the configural, metric, scalar, factor variance, factor covariance, and factor means invariances of the model across gender and age groups. The validity of the Russian version of the UWES-9 was investigated by studying its relationship with burnout, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and turnover intention. The CFA showed that both the 1-factor and the 3-factor models of the UWES-9 fit well with the data, but the 3-factor model demonstrates a significantly better fit. However, the differences are minor; therefore, in practical terms, the models are identical. Thus the Russian version of the UWES-9 can be used both as a three-scale measurement and as a single scale of work engagement. Results from the multi-group CFA provided evidence of factorial invariance of the 3-factor model across gender and age groups. Internal consistencies of the vigor, dedication, and absorption subscales are acceptable. The results also suggested the convergent, discriminant, and incremental validity of the UWES-9, as shown by its relationship with burnout, job satisfaction, life satisfaction, and turnover intention. The article also discusses the differences in levels of work engagement within different gender and age groups. Overall, the results show that the Russian version of the UWES-9 demonstrates acceptable psychometric properties comparable with the original version and those in other languages. The Russian version of the UWES-9 can therefore be recommended for use in research and practice.

This paper studies the dynamics of key characteristics of the academic profession in Russia based on the analysis of university faculty in the two largest cities in Russia – Moscow and St Petersburg. We use data on Russian university faculty from two large-scale comparative studies of the academic profession (‘The Carnegie Study’ carried out in 1992 in 14 countries, including Russia, and ‘The Changing Academic Profession Study’, 2007–2012, with 19 participating countries and which Russia joined in 2012) to look at how faculty’s characteristics and attitudes toward different aspects of their academic life changed over 20 years (1992–2011) such as faculty’s views on reasons to leave or to stay at a university, on university’s management and the role of faculty in decision making. Using the example of universities in the two largest Russian cities, we demonstrate that the high degree of overall centralization of governance in Russian universities barely changed in 20 years.

Our paper provides comparisons of teaching/research preferences and views on statements concerning personal strain associated with work, academic career perspectives, etc., not only in Russian universities between the years 1992 and 2012, but also in Russia and other ‘Changing Academic Profession’ countries.

Is in utero exposure to testosterone correlated with earnings? The question matters for understanding determinants of wage differences that have attracted so much attention among economists in the past decade. Evidence indicates that markers for early testosterone exposure are correlated with traits like risk-taking and aggressiveness. But it is not at all clear how such findings might map into labor market success. We combine unique data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey with measured markers (2D:4D ratios) for testosterone exposure and find that lower digit ratios (higher T) correlate with higher wages for women and for men, when controlling for age, education and occupation. There is also some evidence of a potential non-linear, inverse U-effect of digit ratios on wages but this is sensitive to choice of specification. These findings are consistent with earlier work on prenatal T and success in careers (Coates et al., 2009) but inconsistent with the work of Gielen et al. (2016) who find differing effects for men and women.

This paper examines the prevalence and the costs of pre-entry coaching programs before and after the introduction of the Unified State Examination in Russia. The efficiency of private tutoring under the new standardized university admission procedures is estimated. It is argued that the main types of pre-entry coaching are still in demand, however the popularity of pre-entry courses at particular universities has declined, and the prevalence of classes with tutors who are not related to university has risen. A few years after the introduction of the Unified State Examination, the level of investment in private tutoring in real terms has barely changed; the returns from such an investment are still positive but moderate.

Entitativity is a key construct for understanding group perception. But the problem of understanding this construct is troublesome. There are three theoretical approaches and at least two different empirical strategy of measuring the entitativity. In the Study 1 entitativity is described as three related components: “essence” (group members' similarity), “agency” (goals and group members' interaction) and “unity” (cohesion of the group and the degree of group importance). A series of confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the three-component model of entitativity fitted the data well for different groups (ingroup, outgroup, intimacy groups and social categories) and demonstrated a better fit, compared to the alternative model. The results of study suggest that components of entitativity are interrelated, but not identical to each other. Study 2 demonstrated that using of different ways of  understanding entitativity (as “essence”, “agency”, “unity” component or common entitativity scale) doesn’t lead to differences in relationship with blatant prejudice, subtle prejudice, and identification. The implications of the obtained results for future research are discussed.

This paper examines the impact of family income on the results of the newly introduced Unified State Examination (USE) in Russia. We argue that entrants from wealthy households have an advantage in terms of access to higher education, since income positively affects USE scores through a higher level of investment in pre-entry coaching. We have found positive and significant relationships between the level of income and USE results for high school graduates, given equal achievement before coaching. We demonstrate that in general, investment in pre-entry coaching has positive returns, but the most significant type of investment is pre-entry courses. However, such strategy improves USE results only for students from the most affluent households.

We study the market discipline by retail depositors of the foreign bank subsidiaries in Russia. We analyze the effect of the direct signal about the bank’s foreign origin – the bank’s title - to deposit growth (quantitative discipline) and interest rates (price discipline) sensitivity to the bank riskiness. We assume that the banks having direct indication of the fact that the owner is a foreign financial company in the banks’ titles, will enjoy greater confidence of retail depositors and therefore less intense market discipline, and this effect will remain unchanged in the crisis of 2008-2009. An alternative hypothesis originates from the consumer ethnocentrism approach, assuming that the signal of foreign ownership will provide an incentive for depositors to monitor the banks more attentively. We use data on 56 foreign banks for 2007-2015. The results suggest that if the bank’s title signals the foreign origin, the deposit growth is significantly more sensitive to a decrease in the capital adequacy ratio or in credit risk, which indicates the ethnocentrism effect, working for disciplining by both quantity and price. The effect for quantitative discipline persists during the crisis of 2008-2009, which is important due to the fact, that this period witnessed the significant inflow of deposits to state and foreign banks from national private ones. The one for price discipline, however, disappears: we witness a reduction in the intensity of price discipline during the crisis for both groups of foreign banks.