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...

This study focuses on how social contexts promote disparities in academic performance between Russian high schools. In particular, we investigate how a school’s average Unified State Examination (USE) scores in Russian and mathematics relate to the social composition of its student body, its...

We provide a measure of inequality of educational opportunity for 72 countries, estimated as a share of the variation in the 2009 PISA test scores that is explained by pre-determined family characteristics. Inequality of opportunity accounts for up to 40 percent of the variation in educational...

This article presents the results of a study on Russian education policy. It explores how compulsory and secondary education meet contemporary social challenges, and how they should be adjusted to account for acute social inequality. The authors present evidence of the growing social...

This article considers the uneven positions of school teachers in different regions of the Russian Federation. There exist numerous research works on the relation of school teachers’ salaries to the characteristics of regional educational systems and regional economies. A range of indicators...

This paper presents evidence of the combined effect of financial constraints and attitudes towards risk in corporate investment. Using panel data on public companies functioning in developed countries, the author shows that demand uncertainty provokes a firm with limited resources to invest...

Recent studies of innovation behavior characteristics focus on analysis of microdata (enterprise level) as the key instrument to reveal facts and hypotheses describing the innovation activities under diverse economic, political and infrastructural conditions. This paper applies the...

Innovations and related knowledge are important drivers of corporate success in modern economies. However the crisis of 2008 strongly influenced investment decisions including R&D expenditure. This may be explained by the fact that the crisis has changed a transformation of corporate resources...

This paper presents evidence of the negative combined effect of financial constraints and real options on corporate investment. Using panel data on public companies functioning in developed countries, the authors prove that with increasing uncertainty surrounding a firm, the real options effect...

This paper investigates the relationship between operating cost efficiency and the loan quality of Rus-sian banks. It tries to answer the question whether it is always beneficial for banks to be highly cost effi-cient (the “bad management” hypothesis) or whether this higher cost efficiency...