Cristina Valentina Heghes

My name is Cristina Valentina Heghes and I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics and Business at Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV), in Spain. I grew up in Romania, but now I’m established in Spain. My mother tongue is Romanian, but in addition to this, I also speak Spanish, Catalan and English. I hold a BA in Business Administration and Management (2018) from Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and a MSc in International Markets (2019) from the same university. Currently, I’m a visiting researcher for a period of three months at LEARN (VU) .

I started my PhD in November 2019 and the goal of my thesis consists of identifying the determinants of the gender gap in school outcomes and analyzing gender segregation in education, by using a sample of Catalan adolescents enrolled in secondary compulsory education and high school. The topic of my PhD is “Gender gap in school outcomes”.

My research is mainly focused on the economics of education, labour economics, gender economics and applied microeconometrics. More specifically, I’m studying a wide set of variables such as cognitive abilities (mathematics test scores, language test scores, among others), labour market outcomes (earnings, occupations, sector, type of employment), personality variables (impatience, nervous, procrastination, stress), skills (mathematical skills, verbal skills, commercial skills) among others. 

In each chapter of my thesis, I am trying to use a different method. In the first chapter, I studied the birth order effect on human capital and labour market outcomes. More specifically, by using ordinal least squares (OLS) and school fixed effects, we observe that firstborn children have higher grades, higher educational aspirations, higher earnings expectations, and higher aspirations to be employed in high-skill jobs. We also observe that firstborn children are more self-confident, less prone to improvise in their daily tasks and spend less time socializing with their mobile phones and watching TV. However, we also find differences between boys and girls. Unlike firstborn girls, firstborn boys are less impatient and put more effort into their studies.

My second chapter is focused on studying the determinants of the gender gap in expected earnings, by using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. As the dominant picture of the literature, we find that girls tend to have systematically lower salary expectations than males, in all scenarios studied (reservation wages, as well as initial salary and salary at 35-40 for themselves and for a random degree assigned). Thus, the decomposition method reveals that most of this effect is attributable to differences in endowments between boys and girls. More specifically, gender differences in male role models play by far a more important role in explaining the gender gaps.

Finally, in the third chapter, the idea is to apply propensity score matching to study the gender gap in entrepreneurship intentions (in this context I don’t have the results, yet).