Budget Uncertainty and Faculty Contracts: A Dynamic Framework for Comparative Analysis

We study hiring decisions made by competing universities in a dynamic framework, focusing on the structure of university finance. Universities with annual state-approved financing underinvest in high-quality faculty, while universities that receive a significant part of their annual income from returns on endowments hire fewer but better faculty and provide long-term contracts. If university financing is linked to the number of students, there is additional pressure to hire low-quality short-term staff. An increase in the university’s budget might force the university to switch its priorities from ‘research’ to ‘teaching’ in equilibrium. We employ our model to discuss the necessity for state-financed endowments, and investigate the political economics of competition between universities, path-dependence in the development of the university system, and higher-education reform in emerging market economies.

Educación doctoral en el mundo: formación de futuros académicos y más allá / Doctoral education across the world: training future academics and beyond

La educación doctoral forma y nutre a los nuevos académicos y es un elemento clave para el futuro exitoso de la academia. El futuro de la universidad contemporánea y de la iniciativa en investigación, cada vez más importante, en todo el mundo depende de la educación doctoral efectiva, imaginativa yrelevante. No obstante, la educación doctoral enfrenta desafíos en todas partes en el siglo XXI

2D: 4D asymmetry and gender differences in academic performance:evidence from Moscow and Manila

Exposure to prenatal androgens affects both future behavior and life choices. However, there is still relatively limited evidence on its effects on academic performance. Moreover, the predicted effect of exposure to prenatal testosterone (T) - which is inversely correlated with the relative length of the second to fourth finger lengths (2D:4D) - would seem to have ambiguous effects on academic achievement since traits like confidence, aggressiveness, or risk-taking are not uniformly positive for success in school. We provide the first evidence of a non-linear relationship between 2D:4D and academic achievement using samples from Moscow and Manila. We find that there is a quadratic relationship between high T exposure and markers of achievement such as grades or test scores and that the optimum digit ratio for women in our sample is lower (indicating higher prenatal T) than the average. The results for men are generally insignificant for Moscow but significant for Manila showing similar non-linear effects. Our work is thus unusual in that it draws from a large sample of nearly a thousand university students in Moscow and over a hundred from Manila for whom we also have extensive information on high school test scores, family background and other potential correlates of achievement. Our work is also the first to have a large cross country comparison that includes two groups with very different ethnic compositions

What Determines Trust? Human Capital vs. Social Institutions: Evidence from Manila and Moscow

It is now well established that highly developed countries tend to score well on measures of social capital and have higher levels of generalized trust. In turn, the willingness to trust has been shown to be correlated with various social and environmental factors (e.g. institutions, culture) on one hand, and accumulated human capital on the other. To what extent is an individual's trust driven by contemporaneous institutions and environmental conditions and to what extent is it determined by the individual's human capital? We collect data from students in Moscow and Manila and use the variation in their height and gender to instrument for measures of their human capital to identify the causal effect of the latter on trust. We find that human capital positively affects the propensity to trust, and its contribution appears larger than the combined effect of other omitted variables including, plausibly, social and environmental factors

Publish or Perish

This article considers the causes and consequences of the increasing role of the “publish or perish” principle in modern academic systems. In particular, it discusses how various types of universities interpret this principle and why its causes differ across academic systems

The Multidisciplinary Roots of Higher Education Research: An Analysis of Citation Patterns

Researchers in higher education (HE) are a community of academics with backgrounds and experiences in a variety of scientific disciplines. For this reason, HE research is influenced by other disciplines from which HE researchers take theories, constructs and research methods. This article describes a large-scale analysis of the impact of different scientific fields on HE research. Special attention is paid to the analysis of the influences of psychology, sociology & political science, and economics as the disciplines that have the greatest impact on HE research. To assess this impact, we analyse citation patterns in seven key HE journals. Our empirical analysis confirms that HE research is indeed a multidisciplinary field and experiences a different impact of identified scientific fields for HE articles of different topics. We analyse the dynamics of such an impact and discuss the factors that may cause the growth of multidisciplinarity in HE research

Doctoral Education: Global Perspectives

Doctoral education worldwide is characterized by a trend toward diversity and, at the same time, toward unification. There is no such a thing as a standard doctoral education model. The landscape of doctoral education across the world is quite diverse and there is a considerable rise in its variations and flexibility. However, doctoral education has become a global market with flows of international students, faculty, and graduates who create a demand for unification of standards and benchmarking

Post-Soviet Russian Academia Struggles with the Past

Contemporary Russian higher education remains influenced by the Soviet past. This historical tradition in general makes change and improvement more difficult. A special problem is the tradition of state planning