Equitable Faculty Evaluation Practices

Faculty evaluation is central to universities, but many strategies for evaluating faculty reflect gender and racial biases. These biases in evaluation help explain the lack of progress most academic institutions have made toward greater representation and inclusion. This makes it urgent for universities to create more equitable review procedures. It is also important to remember that faculty evaluation is a continual process, and not simply a set of discrete, formal, evaluative events. Thus, to improve evaluation of faculty, we need to target how we evaluate faculty in formal and informal ways. The good news is that relatively simple changes in process and practice can enhance equity and inclusion in faculty evaluation

Fiscal Decentralization in the Soviet Economy*

This paper surveys local public finance developments in the former Soviet Union during perestroika. We argue that there was a significant decentralization of taxation power and responsibility to the oblast and city levels between 1985 and 1990. This decentralization, accompanied by more pressure on local organizations to spend, led to the breakdown of a coordinated all-Union fiscal system.

Complementarity and Custom in Wage Contract Violation

We present and estimate a model with strategic complementarities in firms' choices of on-time or delayed wage payment. Linked employer-employee panel data from Russia facilitate identification of the endogenous interactions through fixed effects for firms, workers, and local labor markets, and instrumental variables based on policy interventions. The estimated reaction function displays strongly positive neighborhood effects, and the estimated feedback loops-worker quits, effort, strikes, and legal penalties-imply that costs of wage delays are attenuated by neighborhood arrears. We also study a nonlinear case with two stable symmetric equilibria: a punctual payment and a late payment equilibrium. Copyright by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.