Ganguli Honored with Russian National Award in Applied Economics

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Ina Ganguli, economics, has been awarded the 2018 Russian National Award in Applied Economics for her series of three articles devoted to analyzing the productivity of Russian scientists in the 1990s, as well as their decisions on emigration and the impact of emigration on the diffusion of Russian science in the United States.

She is scheduled to receive the award in a ceremony at the XIX April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development April 11 in Moscow.

The Russian National Award in Applied Economics is given every two years for outstanding published papers on the Russian economy at the country, industry, regional or company level. The main purpose of the award is to identify works of high importance to the development of academic research and economics education in Russia, as well as to the increased efficiency of the Russian economy and economic policy.

As in previous years, all of the works that were nominated for the competition underwent an anonymous peer-review process by at least two experts. The majority of them were world-renowned researchers who represent top universities and research institutes.

“This year the topics of the works were truly broad, ranging from problems of employment in science-intensive industries in the USSR and modern Russia all the way to the role of economic and political institutions in economic development and issues concerning the history of Soviet economic science. I want to note the high quality of the majority of works nominated for the prize this year. Even against this backdrop, the works by professor Ganguli stand out thanks to their originality, the important questions they raise, the high-level reasoning in the answers to these questions, and the thoroughness demonstrated in working with data,” wrote jury member Michael Alexeev of Indiana University Bloomington.

All three of Ganguli’s works are based on a unique set of data. She reached her conclusions using contemporary econometric methods that allowed her to establish cause-and-effect relationships.

In her work “Saving Soviet Science: The Impact of Grants When Government R&D Funding Disappears” published in AEJ-Applied Economics, Ganguli focuses on the effect of the smaller grants that George Soros’ foundation gave as emergency funding to support scientists amid the sharp decline in state funding for the natural sciences immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. These grants caused a spike in the recipients’ scientific activities with minimal associated costs. The work also studies the grants’ impact on the emigration of recipients and the differentiation of the effects compared to different categories of scientists.

Published in the Journal of Labor Economics, the article “Immigration and Ideas: What Did Russian Scientists ‘Bring’ to the United States?” shows that the immigration of Russian scientists to the U.S. considerably broadened the familiarity of their American colleagues with scientific works published in Soviet journals, works produced by both the immigrants themselves, as well as other Russian researchers.

The third piece, “Who Leaves and Who Stays? Evidence on Immigrant Selection from the Collapse of Soviet Science” researches factors that impact the researchers’ decision to emigrate. The author shows that, all else being equal, the likelihood of emigration is higher for men, as well as for younger and more productive scientists.

Ganguli is a core faculty member of the UMass Computational Social Science Institute.  She holds a doctorate from Harvard University and a master’s in public policy from the University of Michigan. Her primary research areas are labor economics and the economics of science and innovation, with a regional focus on countries of the former Soviet Union.

The Russian National Award in Applied Economics was established in 2009 by the Higher School of Economics, Moscow; New Economic School, Moscow; the Ural Federal University, Ekaterinburg; Association of Russian Economic Think Tanks, Moscow; RAS Institute of World Economy and International Relations; and Expert business magazine, Moscow.