Hiring Your Friends: Evidence from the Market for Financial Economists

Abstract

The authors study connections in academic hiring in a sample of finance doctoral graduates. Departments hire PhD graduates with school connections to other recently hired faculty at a significantly greater rate than models predict. Similarly, schools exhibit an elevated propensity to hire individuals with names that indicate a similar ethnic background to incumbent department members. School-connected hires tend to publish at significantly elevated rates, a finding that is robust to a large number of model modifications and is stronger in more research-intensive departments. The evidence on school connections appears highly consistent with an employer information benefit from hiring based on school connections. Ethnic-connected hires tend to publish at lower-than-predicted rates when controlling for hiring-school characteristics, but this finding is not robust to the inclusion of hiring-school fixed effects. This evidence suggests that the possible information benefits of school-connected hiring do not immediately extend to other types of connections.

Exploring the effects of mobility and foreign nationality on internal career progression in universities

“…Due to confidentiality rules, we could not retrieve information about individual scientific productivity; the "Robustness tests" section explored the possibility of a systematic productivity gap between mobile and non-mobile, foreign and national researchers, and found little support in this respect. Other relevant factors, such as personal ties (e.g., Fisman et al, 2018;Hadlock & Pierce, 2021) or institutional prestige and ties (Burris, 2004), were not explored. Moreover, future research needs to shed more light on differences within the group of mobile and foreign scientists, based, for instance, on the prestige of institution of origin and the strength of scientific relationships between two countries, as well as explore more in depth the reasons underpinning the effect of important variables such as gender, and type of funding support, which are beyond the scope of this study.…”

Are You Local? Academic Library Hiring Prior to and During COVID-19 in the United States

“…In addition to the fact that search committee members cannot know all there is to know about the candidates under consideration, it is also the case that search committee members do not give every bit of information they do collect equal attention. For example, search committee members accord particular weight to similarities they perceive between themselves and certain candidates (Rivera, 2012(Rivera, , 1001Hadlock & Pierce, 2021). Search committee members may also focus more heavily on some pieces of information or some candidate characteristics than others, at times relying on cognitive shortcuts to make hiring decisions.…”