Papers by Natalia Zinovyeva
Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, LEM Working Paper Series 2014/14 , Jun 21, 2014
This paper analyzes whether the presence of women in academic committees benefits female candidat... more This paper analyzes whether the presence of women in academic committees benefits female candidates. We exploit evidence from Italy, where candidates to Full and Associate Professor positions are required to qualify in a nation-wide evaluation known as Abilitazione Scientifica Nazionale. In 2012, these evaluations involved around 66,000 applications in all academic disciplines and around 900 (randomly chosen) evaluators. We estimate the causal effect of committees' gender composition exploiting the procedure of random assignment of evaluators to committees. Each additional female evaluator decreases by 2 percentage points the success rate of female candidates. The effect is similar in magnitude in evaluations for Full and Associate Professor positions, but it is only statistically significant in the later case. Information from 260,000 individual evaluations suggests that the presence of women in the committee affects the voting behavior of men. Overall, our results cast doubts on the convenience of introducing gender quotas in academia.
Some European governments aim to promote their universities' performance in international ranking... more Some European governments aim to promote their universities' performance in international rankings by creating financial incentives. This column explains that such policies can backfire, taking the example of recent research on Italy. Policy makers should be very cautious in using students' academic performance as a proxy for university value.
Abstract This article examines the complementarity among information and communication technologi... more Abstract This article examines the complementarity among information and communication technologies (ICT), skills, and organizational change from a panel of 680 Italian manufacturing firms during 1995–2003. By drawing on different statistical methods, we found evidence of complementarity between skills and organizational change, but did not find evidence of complementarity between ICT and skills.
Abstract The systems of Higher Education are undergoing deep institutional reforms in most Europe... more Abstract The systems of Higher Education are undergoing deep institutional reforms in most European countries. In this paper we analyze the experience of Italy during the 90s. In this period universities were affected by dramatic demographic changes and the introduction of new financing schemes. We show empirically that the apparent increase in competition had an effect on grading standards. Particularly, standards deteriorated mostly in those degrees that were less demanded.
CESifo Economic Studies, Jan 1, 2008
This article documents that grades vary significantly across Italian public universities and degr... more This article documents that grades vary significantly across Italian public universities and degrees. We provide evidence suggesting that these differences reflect the heterogeneity of grading standards. A straightforward implication of this result is that university funding schemes based on students' academic performance do not necessary favour universities that generate higher value added. We test this for the case of the Italian funds allocation system, which rewards universities according to the number of exams passed by their students. We find that university departments that rank higher according to this indicator actually tend to be significantly worse in terms of their graduates' performance in the labour market. (JEL codes: I2, J31, J64)
This paper studies how the gender composition of committees affects promotions. We exploit eviden... more This paper studies how the gender composition of committees affects promotions. We exploit evidence from a large-scale randomized natural experiment: the system of centralized examinations to determine academic promotions that was implemented in Spain between 2002 and 2006. These competitions involved around 30,000 candidacies and 7,000 (randomly selected) evaluators. In exams to full professor positions, we find that evaluators tend to favor same-sex candidates who belong to their own academic network. This evidence is consistent with the existence of old boys and old girls networks. In exams to associate professor positions, senior evaluators do not exhibit any gender preference. Female junior evaluators exhibit an opposite-sex preference when assessing candidates from their own institution, perhaps for strategic reasons. Our results suggest that gender quotas may not necessarily increase female representation. Their effect will depend on the extent to which academic networks are gendered, evaluators' strategic concerns, and the position at stake.
Abstract: The selection of evaluators is subject to a well-known dilemma. Evaluators who are acqu... more Abstract: The selection of evaluators is subject to a well-known dilemma. Evaluators who are acquainted with candidates may possess superior information about their quality. Unfortunately, their criteria might also be biased. This paper analyzes the role of connections in academic promotions using evidence from centralized evaluations in Spain. Applicants have significantly better chances of success if they are randomly assigned to an evaluation committee that includes an acquainted evaluator. However, the source of this ...
Industrial and Corporate Change, Jan 1, 2011
This article investigates whether the quality of higher education and, in particular, its researc... more This article investigates whether the quality of higher education and, in particular, its research performance stimulate graduates' research-oriented careers. More specifically, exploiting a very rich data set on university graduates and the higher education institutions they attended, we empirically study whether graduates from universities and programs that display better academic research records are more likely to be enrolled in PhDs or employed as researchers 3 years after graduation. Controlling for a number of individual and university covariates and using different proxies for research performance, we find that the likelihood of entering a research-oriented career increases with the quality of academic research. Notably, the inclusion of university-fixed effects shows that this result does not stem from unobserved university heterogeneity. Our finding is stronger for graduates in hard sciences, medicine, and engineering.
SERIEs - Journal of the Spanish Economic Association, Mar 2014
This paper provides the first evidence on the dynamics of immigrant students' achievement followi... more This paper provides the first evidence on the dynamics of immigrant students' achievement following their migration to Spain. Using the data from 2003, 2006 and 2009 wave of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), we show that immigrant students tend to perform significantly worse than native students, but that their performance improves with time spent in Spain. Among immigrants, Latin Americans enjoy an initial linguistic advantage, which, however, does not help them to catch up faster. The rate of improvement is such that students who stay almost all their lives in Spain still perform worse than natives in all domains analyzed by PISA. To better understand this achievement gap, we decompose it into parts attributable to school quality and to family characteristics. We observe that most of the gap is explained by individual and family characteristics and that less than 15% of it can be attributed to differential school attendance. Overall, the evidence suggests that policies that do not target the learning environment in disadvantaged families are likely to have a limited impact on the native-immigrant achievement gap.
EALE Annual Conference, Oslo, Jan 1, 2007
Recent changes in hiring, reward and promotion systems that increase professors' incentives to do... more Recent changes in hiring, reward and promotion systems that increase professors' incentives to do research (publish and patent)
Research Policy, Apr 2013
... This research was supported by the DYREC Chaire d' Excellence of Robin Cowan... more ... This research was supported by the DYREC Chaire d' Excellence of Robin Cowan, funded by the French ANR, and grants from ESF COST and APE-INV projects. ... 2 Page 4. is the problem identifying causation in a system rife with endogeneity. In fact, the positive ...
Evolutionary and Institutional Economics Review, Jan 1, 2010
The paper reviews the main directions of research in evolutionary economics related to the analys... more The paper reviews the main directions of research in evolutionary economics related to the analysis of multilevel selection processes, where multilevel selection refers to the operation of the natural selection at individual and group level. The study reviews the history and the applications of multilevel selection approach and summarizes the main findings with respect to the role of the group in evolutionary dynamics. It also describes how the aggregate evolutionary dynamics could be decomposed into innovation and selection effects using famous George Price's decomposition developed for the analysis of biological evolution .
Efectos económicos de la …, Jan 1, 2009
Durante los últimos años, España ha experimentado un aumento sin precedentes de la población extr... more Durante los últimos años, España ha experimentado un aumento sin precedentes de la población extranjera, recibiendo casi la mitad de flujos 04_ZINOVYEVA
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Papers by Natalia Zinovyeva