科学研究

Xing Li is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University, He joined Peking University in 2016 after receiving his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University. His research interests cover online advertising, durable goods pricing, UGC community, as well as intellectual property and incentive schemes in the field of economics. He published in leading international journals such as Management Science, RAND Journal of Economics, The Economic Journal, Journal of Academy and Marketing Science, and Chinese academic journals such as Journal of Marketing Science and Studies in World Religions.

Gender inequality exists in funding applications in academia, and female scholars have less access to funding opportunities. This paper documents the unintended consequences of a policy aiming to increase the funding opportunities for female researchers. The National Science Foundation of China once extended the age limit for female applicants for the Young Scientist Fund from 35 to 40, while keeping the limit unchanged for males. Leveraging the individual-level application data, we find that compared to male applicants, the award rate for female applicants who were originally eligible decreased by 5.8% after the policy, which is substantial compared to the average award rate of around 22%. We identify two mechanisms explaining this effect. First, the relaxation of the age limit leads to procrastination and highly qualified females tend to delay more, lowering the average quality of the female applications. This explains 46.6\% of the effect. Second, the entry of senior female applicants poses more competition to the young females than to males, due to gender differences in topic choices. We provide supporting evidence for both mechanisms and use a theoretical model to elaborate on the second one. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications.