Professional Interactions and Hiring Decisions: Evidence from the Federal Judiciary / Marco Battaglini, Jorgen M. Harris, Eleonora Patacchini.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Battaglini, Marco.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Harris, Jorgen M.

Patacchini, Eleonora.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w26726.

NBER working paper series no. w26726

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Other Title:

Professional Interactions and Hiring Decisions

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.

Summary:

We examine the effect of hearing cases alongside female judicial colleagues on the probability that a federal judge hires a female law clerk. Federal judges are assigned to cases and to judicial panels at random and have few limitations on their choices of law clerks: these two features make the federal court system a unique environment in which to study the effect of professional interactions and beliefs in organizations. We constructed a unique dataset by aggregating federal case records from 2007-2017 to collect information on federal judicial panels, and by merging this data with judicial hiring information from the Judicial Yellow Book, a directory of federal judges and clerks. We find that a one standard deviation increase in the fraction of co-panelists who are female increases a judge's likelihood of hiring a female clerk by 4 percentage points. This finding suggests that increases in the diversity of the upper rungs of a profession can shift attitudes in a way that creates opportunities at the entry level of a profession.

Notes:

Print version record

January 2020.