Publications

For several years, the Russian system of higher education had been undergoing massive transformations related to the enhancement of the global competitiveness of the national academic sector. The introduction of research-oriented universities and the transition to incentive contracts are the main elements of the reform. In this article we show how these institutional changes contribute to reducing the problem of gender inequality in academia. Based on comprehensive data from a Russian faculty survey (MEMO), it is found that there are considerable differences in gender wage inequality by university status: female faculty earn significantly lower salaries in ordinary universities, but there are no gender differences in pay in research-oriented universities, which are most actively transitioning to incentive remuneration schemes. Female faculty experience vertical segregation: women are less likely to achieve senior positions in university hierarchies. We also found indirect evidence of women’s self-selection for lower-paid positions: female faculty are less likely to achieve advanced degrees and to have research publications.  Overall, the study shows that male faculty earns 8.7% higher salaries than female counterparts after controlling for all observable characteristics. Oaxaca decomposition showed that 53% of the gender wage gap can be explained by observable characteristics, while the rest can be attributed to discrimination, self-selection or unobservable factors. In the absence of discrimination, male faculty should earn 10% higher salaries, but due to discrimination and unobservable factors, male faculty, on average, earn 18.7% more. However, the gender wage gap in academia is considerably below the national average: women earned on average around 80% of male salaries in academic sector, while in the whole Russian economy women earned around 70% of men’s wages.

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.

This paper discusses whether being smart makes depositors less prone to get involved in a panic bank run. We conduct a series of experiments with undergraduate and graduate students from Moscow and Saint-Petersburg, modelling the a-la Diamond-Dybvig deposit market with liquidity shocks, changing macroeconomic conditions and risk-based investment technologies. Our results suggest that withdrawing on time is profitable, as the average returns of depositor investments are higher, especially if the other depositors in the bank also withdraw on time. Smarter depositors – those having better academic achievements – choose the strategy of avoiding early withdrawals more frequently: each additional grade point (out of ten) adds 9 p.p. to the share of rounds where a depositor withdraws on time. This result adds to the evidence that financial literacy – even measured in a very simple way – may prevent a coordination failure in the deposit market. Our results also suggest that panic withdrawals are more probable in markets with poorer economic conditions (liquidity shocks, less profitable or less liquid investments, costly financial information), but depositors show weak sensitivity to the risks of bank investments. Depositors of medium-sized banks withdraw on time more frequently compared to those in small or large banks.

The literature on the consequences of academic inbreeding shows ambiguous results: some papers show that inbreeding positively influences research productivity measured by the quantity and quality of publications, while others demonstrate the opposite effect. There are contradictory results both in the studies of different countries and within countries. This variety of results makes it impossible to transfer the findings from one academic system to another, and in Russia this problem has been under-explored. This paper focuses on the relationship between inbreeding and publication activity among Russian faculty. The research was conducted using data from the ‘Monitoring of Educational Markets and Organizations’ survey. The results show that there is no significant effect of academic inbreeding on publication productivity: no substantial and robust differences in publication activity between inbreds and non-inbreds have been found. The paper finishes with a discussion of possible explanations inherent in the Russian academic system.

  

In this study, we investigated how scientific collaboration represented by co-authorship is related to citation indicators of a scientist. We use co-authorship network to explore the structure of scientific collaboration. For network construction, the profiles of scientists from various countries and scientific fields in Google Scholar were used. We ran the count data regression model for a sample of more than 30 thousand authors with the first citation after 2007 to analyze the correlation between co-authorship network parameters of scientists and their citation characteristics. We identify that there is a positive correlation between citation of scientist and number of his co-authors, between citation and the author’s closeness centrality, and between scholar’s citation and the average citation of his co-authors. Also, we reveal that h-index and i10-index are correlated significantly with the number of co-authors and average citation of co-authors. Based on these results, we can conclude that scientists who maintain more contacts and more active than others have better bibliometric indicators on an average.

A meta-analysis was conducted to examine the relationship between outgroup entitativity and prejudice. A quantitative analysis of 85 effect sizes from 33 independent samples showed a significant positive relationship between entitativity and prejudice (Fisher’s z = .414, 95% CI [.272, .557], p < .0001). Three possible moderators of the relationship between entitativity and prejudice were tested: conceptualization of the entitativity (essence-based entitativity scale, agency-based entitativity scale, common entitativity scale), the target of the prejudice, the measures of prejudice (attitudes, emotions, behavior towards outgroup). Results demonstrated that outgroup entitativity correlated with prejudice only when entitativity was conceptualized as an essence-based or common-based scale, and prejudice was measured as the attitude to the outgroup. The target of prejudice does not moderate the relationship between entitativity and prejudice.

In this paper, we consider how the intensity and channels of the relation between social networks and bank loyalty vary according to the state of the economy. We analyze bank exit over the period 2005– 2012 for over 300,000 retail clients of a commercial bank that experienced a bank run in 2008 due to a shock in solvency risk. The unique and rich data we constructed in close collaboration with the bank enables us to distinguish different sorts of family networks from neighborhood networks, while controlling for a wide range of client-level and branch-level characteristics and events. Using a proportional hazards model, we show the importance of family networks. In times of financial distress, family networks become even more important and retail clients take weaker, less direct social relationships into account

This paper estimates the impact of corruption on the incentives of procurers to maintain honest competition in tenders. Customers, who procure for themselves, and Agencies, who procure for the customers in their region are considered. Basing on a large dataset of open auctions conducted by Russian regional-level authorities in 2011, the analysis shows that in highly corrupt regions, Agencies fail to arrange competitive tenders and most of auctions have one bidder. Customers attract more bidders for large contracts, but rebates are usually low. Therefore, procurement centralization may reduce the corruption of Customers, but cannot solve the problem of low competition.

Disputes over penalties for breaching a contract are often resolved in court. A simple model illustrates how inefficient courts can sway public buyers from enforcing a penalty for late delivery in order to avoid litigation, therefore inducing sellers to delay contract delivery. By using a large dataset on Italian public procurement, we empirically study the effects of court inefficiency on public work performance. We find that where courts are inefficient: i) public works are delivered with longer delays; ii) delays increase for more valuable contracts; iii) contracts are more often awarded to larger suppliers; and iv) a higher share of the payment is postponed after delivery. Other interpretations receive less support from the data.

In recent years the Russian banking system has witnessed numerous bank license withdrawals. Many of the failed banks had significant volumes of retail deposits in their liabilities, thus, transmitting the default burden to the Deposit Insurance Agency and ultimately to the taxpayers. In their attempt to stay in the market banks may try to attract the depositor funds even more intensively when the failure is not far away. The main assumption of this paper is that banks raise additional funds through inflated deposit interest rates – the overstatement strategy – before leaving the market. We use unique data on Russian bank deposit interest rates for deposits of different maturities in 2015–2016 combined with data about bank fundamentals coming from their financial statements. The results suggest that if a bank offers too generous interest rates for deposits for 180-365 days this can be a signal of a significantly higher probability of license withdrawal in 3 quarters. In their attempt to urgently attract funds when moving closer to default banks assign the highest rates for the longest-term deposits, with the maturity over one year. The interest rates higher than the market average dramatically increase the probability of a bank failure in 2 quarters.

Our empirical tests generally support the hypothesis that up to certain values of the average per capita income its growth tends to lead to increased risks of sociopolitical destabilization, and only in the upper range of this indicator its growth tends to be associated with the decrease of sociopolitical destabilization risks. However, our analysis has shown that for various indices of sociopolitical destabilization this curvilinear relationship can be quite different in some important details. On the other hand, we detect the presence of a very important exception. We show that the relationship between per capita GDP and the intensity of coups and coup attempts is not curvilinear; in this case we are rather dealing with a pronounced negative correlation; a particularly strong negative correlation is observed between this index and the logarithm of GDP per capita. We demonstrate that this fact makes the abovementioned bell-shaped relationship with respect to the integral index of sociopolitical destabilization considerably less distinct and makes a very significant contribution to the formation of its asymmetry (when the negative correlation between per capita GDP and sociopolitical destabilization among the richer countries looks much stronger than the positive correlation among poorer countries). However, our analysis shows that for all the other indices of sociopolitical destabilization we do witness the bell-shaped relationship. On the other hand, for example, in relation to such indices, as political strikes, riots and anti-government demonstrations we deal with such an asymmetry that is directly opposite to that mentioned above - with such an asymmetry, when a positive correlation between GDP and instability for poorer countries is much stronger than the negative correlation for richer countries.

Psychological essentialism is the layperson’s belief that social categories are natural and entitative. Studies have shown that essentialist beliefs are strongly connected with different types of prejudice. Previous research into essentialist beliefs predominantly used a variable-centered approach to investigate the relationship between essentialist beliefs and prejudice. Extending this research, we used a person-centered approach to explore the relationship between different essentialist beliefs related to sexual orientation and gender (naturalness, homogeneity, discreteness and informativeness). The study involved 282 (sample 1) and 194 (sample 2) respondents from Russia with different sexual orientations. Using latent profile analysis, we identified three distinct essentialist belief profiles, which are the same for both our target groups, gay men and lesbian women. We examined the relationships between belonging to essentialist belief profiles and social distance towards gay men and lesbian women. We found individuals from various profiles differed in levels of gender identification and right-wing authoritarianism. Individuals with relatively low levels of naturalness beliefs and high levels of essentialist beliefs about the social and psychological differences between gender groups and between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals demonstrated greater social distance towards gay men and lesbian women compared to respondents with lower essentialist beliefs in the differences between groups.

On a large dataset of Italian municipalities for the period 2003–2014, we investigate unexplored effects of fiscal consolidation in decentralized public finance. Based on a simple, realistic theoretical model, we show that municipalities increase arrears on committed public investment expenditure as a response to intergovernmental transfer cuts. Then, we test our predictions controlling for potential sources of endogeneity, and find that a reduction in central government transfers causes a significant increase in arrears, besides other usual adjustments to local fiscal policy (e.g., tax revenues). Our results highlight a perverse effect of fiscal consolidation packages implemented by centrally imposed fiscal restraints.

JEL classification: H30; H72; H77; C33; C36.

Homophily - tendency for people to form social connections with similar others - is one of the key topics in social network analysis. It indicates to what extent people tend to be similar to their friends and in what dimensions. For the long time homophily was just an index of the social similarity, but for the recent years the interest for the homophily formation, dynamics and multidimensionality increased. In this paper we investigate the homophily in such social constructed behavior as food consumption and academic achievements. The study of body mass index in social network context reveals the presence of homophily, which means that persons with similar constitution are more likely to be interconnected with each other. Interestingly, that healthy food consumption has no impact on social network formation, but there is homophily based on fast food consumption. Thus, ‘bad habits’ are stronger forces for the social ties formation. This results show that social constructed behavior is an important component on the process of social network formation.

This paper studies the publication productivity of inbreds and non-inbreds among Russian academics. The literature provides ambiguous results on the relationship between inbred status and productivity. This may be explained by the focus on different segments of academia as well as by using different indicators for measuring publication productivity. We exploit data from 3 datasets covering different segments of the academic population and included different indicators of the publication productivity to see whether inbreds and non-inbreds differ in their productivity. We did not find any difference in current publication productivity between s and non-inbreds. We found, however, a difference between inbreds and non-inbreds in whole career publication productivity; non-inbreds are more productive on an individual level. While focusing on Russian data, an analysis of the 3 datasets suggests an explanation for the contradictory existing results on the relationship between academic inbreeding and productivity in general.

Scholars have focussed on income inequality as a major source of social instability. But the focus on crude income inequality has masked the deeper developmental problem facing many fast growing economies, i.e. the different expectations about what kinds of inequality are relevant. China is an extreme case of this issue inasmuch as its coastal regions can be viewed as comparable to middle income states, while the greater part of its rural and western areas would be comparable to the poorer nations of the world. That means that the new middle class pays attention to the issues such as pollution and status or positional goods than simple material goods. Construction costs of houses are in particular less than location. Other status goods are similar because they are not amenable to simple productivity improvement. This will make policies more difficult as conflict increases between those areas still eager for basic economic development and those richer areas whose wants and needs start to more closely resemble the preferences of richer developed countries.

We consider alternative European public procurement mechanisms for acquiring RD (ii) degree of specificity of the innovation; (iii) role of SMEs in the market and level of market competition; (iv) risk of market foreclosure and supplier lock-in. This article contributes to the literature on incentives in demand-side innovation policy by tapping into the contractual design features and by offering relevant implications for academics and policy makers.