Natalia Zinovyeva
Investigador Post-doc
PhD in Economics, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, 2005

Postdoctoral Research Fellow in BETA, University of Strasbourg, 2005-2007

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, FEDEA, since December 2007


Campos de Investigación:
Economics of Education, Economics of Science, Knowledge and Technology diffusion
Foto Investigador
Enlaces Fedea
Página Web personal:
Información de Contacto:
C/ Jorge Juan, 46
28001   Madrid 		Email: nzinovyeva@fedea.es
Tel: +34 91 435 9209 ext. 210
Últimas Investigaciones:

My main research interests lie in the areas of economics of education and economics of science.

Below you can find the abstracts and the links to some of my research papers:

"Does Gender Matter for Academic Promotion? Evidence From a Randomized Natural Experiment?" (co-authored with M. Bagues)

Given the lack of women in academia, several countries have recently adopted gender quotas in hiring and promotion committees. This paper studies whether these policies may work. The identification strategy exploits the random assignment mechanism in place between 2002 and 2006 in all academic disciplines in Spain to select the members of promotion committees. We find that a larger share of female evaluators increases the chances of success of female applicants to full professor positions, but it decreases the chances of success of female applicants to associate professor positions. The evidence is consistent with the existence of ambivalent sexism, and with some female evaluators behaving strategically.

"Stimulating Graduates' Research-Oriented Careers: Does Academic Research Matter?" (co-authored with M. Sylos Labini, Industrial and Corporate Change, forthcoming)

This paper 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 enroled in PhDs or employed as researchers three 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. 

"Differential Grading Standards and University Funding: Evidence from Italy" (co-authored with M. Bagues and M. Sylos Labini, CESinfo Economic Studies, 54, 2008)

This paper 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.

"The Relationship between Academic Research, Teaching Quality and Graduates' Employment Outcomes" (co-authored with M. Sylos Labini)

Research quality is often considered as the most reliable indicator of both universities and professors performance. However, it remains to a large extent unclear whether students benefit from faculties' research activity. This paper analyzes the relationship between academic research, students' satisfaction, and graduates employment outcomes. First, using self reported measures of students' satisfaction we show that they positively correlate with academic research quality. Second, we exploit a repeated survey of Italian university graduates and various measures of time varying research productivity and quality (i.e. bibliographic indicators and expert evaluation) to measure the impact of academic research on graduate employment outcome. Our results suggest that the quality of academic research positively affects graduates' performance in the labour market. In particular, graduates from departments that improve the quality of academic research are more likely to find jobs that match with the knowledge acquired at university.

"The Endogeneity of University Grading Standards and Labor Market Mismatch: Evidence from Italy" (co-authored with M. Bagues and M. Sylos Labini)

Using a representative sample of Italian individuals who graduated in distinct years, we find that grades tend to increase over time in those departments that face lower demand and vice versa. Moreover, graduates from relatively high-grading departments tend to perform significantly worse in the labour market. This evidence suggests that the strategic adjustment of grading standards may contribute to the generation of labour market mismatch. Most worryingly, the endogeneity of grading standards seems to have strengthened after the reform in the mid 90s that related the distribution of financial resources across institutions to the number of students and graduates.

"Immigration and Students' Achievement in Spain" (co-authored with F. Felgueroso and P. Vazquez)

In this paper we assess the educational performance of immigrant and native pupils in Spain using data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We find that immigrant pupils perform significantly worse than native pupils. However, they improve their performance with time they stay in Spain. Interestingly, immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries do not improve their performance as fast as immigrants from other countries do. Finally, we observe that most of the achievement gap between native and immigrant students is explained by individual and family characteristics and less than 15% of the gap can be attributed to differential school attendance.

"Papers or Patents: Channels of University Effect on Regional Innovation" (co-authored with R. Cowan)

This paper analyzes empirically the channels through which university research affects industry innovation. We examine how the opening of new science, medicine and engineering departments in Italy during 1985-2000 affected regional innovation systems. We find that creation of a new university department increased regional innovation activity 3-4 years later. On average, an opening of a new department in a region has led to a ten percent change in the number of patents filed by regional firms. Given that this effect occurs within the first half decade of the appearance of a new department, it cannot be ascribed to improvements in the quality and quantity of graduates. At the same time, traditional measures of academic research activity can explain only at most around 50 percent of this effect, of which the lion's share is due to publications.

"ICT, Skills, and Organizational Change: Evidence from Italian Manufacturing Firms" (co-authored with P. Giuri and S. Torrisi, Industrial and Corporate Change, 17:1, 2008)

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. Moreover, our results show that the hypothesis of full complementarity among ICT, human capital, and organizational change does not apply to small and medium firms. Instead, we discovered that organizational change yields negative effects on the complementarity between ICT and human capital.