THE CAUSAL IMPACT OF PERFORMANCE-BASED FUNDING ON UNIVERSITY PERFORMANCE: QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE FROM A POLICY IN RUSSIAN HIGHER EDUCATION

Tommaso Agasisti (), Ekaterina Abalmasova (), Ekaterina Shibanova and Aleksei Egorov
Additional contact information
Ekaterina Abalmasova: National Research University Higher School of Economics
Ekaterina Shibanova: National Research University Higher School of Economics

HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics

Abstract: In most countries which experience structural transformation of their higher education system, a crucial goal of policy makers is to tie the amount of university public funding to their performance. This research analyzes the Russian performance-based funding (PBF) reform to provide a quasi-experimental assessment of its effects on Russian universities’ performance. Data comes from the Monitoring for HEIs performance and covers the period between 2014/2015 and 2017/2018. To evaluate the causal effect of the PBF policy on university performance, in a first step we define the treatment and the control groups by distinguishing universities on the basis of the trend in their performance-based allocations. In a second step, we estimated the causal effect of the redistribution of public funds across universities as a result of PBF policy. Results indicate that the performance of universities is actually affected by getting extra funding after the reform, although heterogeneity is at play. The short-run effect is related with the impact on average national exam scores, indicating that the policy forced universities to be more selective.

Keywords: performance-based funding; higher education funding; policy evaluation; difference-in-differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I22 I23 I28 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in WP BRP Series: Economics / EC, December 2019, pages 1-27

Downloads: (external link)
https://wp.hse.ru/data/2019/12/06/1520936349/221EC2019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hig:wpaper:221/ec/2019

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in HSE Working papers from National Research University Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shamil Abdulaev () and Shamil Abdulaev ().