Does the government support of leading universities affect not supported ones?

Anna Panova presented a joint research with Maria Yudkevich, Andrey Lovakov, and Ivan Sterligov on CInSt research seminar on 27th February.

In 2013, Russia launched its research excellence initiative “Project 5-100” to support a group of leading universities with a strong international academic reputation in order to improve the global visibility of Russian universities. However, spillover effects of this initiative are understudied. The authors aim to estimate the effect of the program on the performance of universities that were not part of the initiative and were not directly supported by it. 

They find that spillover effects do indeed exist. The proximity of a not supported university to a supported one has a significant positive effect on the quality of freshmen (USE scores) in non supported universities. There is a positive effect on the level of publication activity that has become significant only in 2017. However, there has been no effect on the share of young faculty and international collaboration in publications.

The presentation is here.

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