Academic Parentage and Academic Careers in Russian Social Sciences

How significant are the advantages of being raised in an academic family for pursuing an academic career? I use the results of a survey of Russian academic economists (N = 2763), combined with a bibliometric dataset from the Russian Index for Scientific Citing, to study the effects of a parent’s PhD degree (a proxy for an academic career) on one’s own trajectory. There is a clear tendency for academic professions to reproduce within families. Overall, 13.3% of respondents reported that their father held a degree, and 7.3% had a mother with a degree (in 2020, less than 0.5% of the Russian population held degrees, according to the national census).
However, the effects beyond increasing the likelihood of entering academia are much less pronounced. Children from academic families do not report higher grade point averages in school, although they do exhibit a slightly higher proficiency in foreign languages. Controlling for age, they are slightly more likely to work in top-tier universities and publish in high-impact journals, but their likelihood of publishing in international editions is not significantly higher. There is only a marginal tendency for them to complete a PhD earlier or earn higher salaries (controlling for the city of residence). In all cases, a mother’s degree is a stronger predictor of career success than a father’s degree.
The overall conclusion is that, while having parents in academia significantly increases the probability of pursuing an academic career in Russia, there is no strong evidence that it greatly facilitates one’s career progression. Various explanations for this seemingly counterintuitive finding are discussed, such as the selection effect among children from less educated families and negative selection among descendants from higher-status families