Ina Ganguli

Closing the Gender Gap in Education: Does it Foretell the Closing of the Employment, Marriage, and Motherhood Gaps?

In this paper we examine several dimensions of gender disparity for a sample of 40 countries using micro-level data. We start by documenting the reversal of the gender education gap and ranking countries by the year in which it reversed. Then we turn to an analysis of the state of other gaps facing women: we compare men and women’s labor force participation (the labor force participation gap), married and single women’s labor force participation (the marriage gap), and mothers’ and non-mother’s labor force participation (the motherhood gap). We show that gaps still exist in these spheres in many countries, though there is significant heterogeneity among countries in terms of the size of and the speed at which these gaps are changing. We also show the relationship between the gaps and ask how much the participation gap would be reduced if the gaps in other spheres were eliminated. In general, we show that while there seems to be a relationship between the decline of the education gap and the reduction of the other gaps, the link is rather weak and highly heterogeneous across countries.

The mobility of elite life scientists: Professional and personal determinants

As scientists’ careers unfold, mobility can allow researchers to find environments where they are more productive and more effectively contribute to the generation of new knowledge. In this paper, we examine the determinants of mobility of elite academics within the life sciences, including individual productivity measures and for the first time, measures of the peer environment and family factors. Using a unique data set compiled from the career histories of 10,051 elite life scientists in the U.S., we paint a nuanced picture of mobility. Prolific scientists are more likely to move, but this impulse is constrained by recent NIH funding. The quality of peer environments both near and far is an additional factor that influences mobility decisions. We also identify a significant role for family structure. Scientists appear to be unwilling to move when their children are between the ages of 14–17, and this appears to be more pronounced for mothers than fathers. These results suggest that elite scientists find it costly to disrupt the social networks of their children during adolescence and take these costs into account when making career decisions.

A Field Experiment on Search Costs and the Formation of Scientific Collaborations

Scientists typically self-organize into teams, matching with others to collaborate in the production of new knowledge. We present the results of a field experiment conducted at Harvard Medical School to understand the extent to which search costs affect matching among scientific collaborators. We generated exogenous variation in search costs for pairs of potential collaborators by randomly assigning individuals to 90-minute structured information-sharing sessions as part of a grant funding opportunity for biomedical researchers. We estimate that the treatment increases the baseline probability of grant co-application of a given pair of researchers by 75% (increasing the likelihood of a pair collaborating from 0.16 percent to 0.28 percent), with effects higher among those in the same specialization. The findings indicate that matching between scientists is subject to considerable frictions, even in the case of geographically-proximate scientists working in the same institutional context with ample access to common information and funding opportunities.

It's Good to Be First: Order Bias in Reading and Citing NBER Working Papers

When choices are made from ordered lists, individuals can exhibit biases toward selecting certain options as a result of the ordering. We examine this phenomenon in the context of consumer response to the ordering of economics papers in an e-mail announcement issued by the NBER. We show that despite the effectively random list placement, papers listed first each week are about 30% more likely to be viewed, downloaded, and subsequently cited. We suggest that a model of “skimming” behavior, where individuals focus on the first few papers in the list due to time constraints, would be most consistent with our findings.

Who Leaves and Who Stays? Evidence on Immigrant Selection from the Collapse of Soviet Science

I draw upon the end of the Soviet Union and the subsequent emigration of scientists westward to provide new estimates of immigrant selection. I use a large unique dataset of over 15,000 Russian scientists across many fields of science who were publishing in the top Soviet journals just before the end of the USSR. The results show that on a number of observable characteristics, emigrant scientists look very different from those who stayed at home. The emigrants were more likely to be men, were younger, and were selected from the upper part of the productivity distribution. I also find that the most skilled were more likely to leave early in the transition period and were more likely to immigrate to the US compared to European countries. The results are consistent with the predictions that positive selection of emigrants increases with migration costs and the returns to skill abroad.

Marriage, education and assortative mating in Latin America

In this article, we establish facts related to marriage and education in Latin American countries. Using census data from IPUMS International, we show how marriage and assortative mating patterns have changed from 1980 to 2000 and how the patterns in Latin America compare to the United States. We find that in Latin American countries, highly educated individuals are less likely to be married than the less educated, and the pattern is stronger for women. We also show that while it has been increasing over time, there is less positive assortative mating in Latin America than in the United States.

Will the U.S. Keep the Best and the Brightest (as Post-docs)? Career and Location Preferences of Foreign STEM PhDs

We estimate the career and location preferences of students in U.S. doctoral programs in a major STEM field – chemistry. Our analysis is based on novel survey conducted in 2017 of 1,605 current Chemistry doctoral students enrolled in the top 54 U.S. research intensive universities. First, we estimate the career preferences of foreign and U.S. STEM students for different types of post-graduation jobs – postdocs, industry, or teaching positions – using both hypothetical choice methods and more standard Likert measures of preferences for different careers. We find that foreign students are generally more interested in academic careers than U.S. students, even when controlling for ability and comparing students from similar subfields and programs. Next, we estimate students’ location preferences using a hypothetical choice method: we ask respondents to choose between two postdoc job offers, where one offer is in the U.S. and one is abroad. We find that foreign students have a stronger preference for U.S. locations even after controlling for ability and career preferences. Our results suggest the U.S. is managing to retain talented foreign graduate students for postdoc positions. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

Immigrant selection before and after communism

The end of the Soviet Union and communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe led to sudden increases in emigration and large changes in wage inequality. This has provided a unique opportunity to understand how these changes altered incentives to emigrate during the transition period. In this paper, I analyze immigrant selection before and after the fall of the Soviet Union within a Roy Model framework, in which the relative return to skills determines the skill composition of immigrants. Using micro‐level data from Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria, matched to Census data on immigrants from these countries in the United States, Spain and Greece in the post‐Soviet period, I find evidence of positive selection of immigrants in the US, and negative selection for Greece and Spain. Using retrospective data from Ukraine during the communist period, I find that selection among Soviet men in the US was intermediate and selection among women was positive.