• Media type: E-Book
  • Title: Professional Interactions and Hiring Decisions : Evidence from the Federal Judiciary
  • Contributor: Battaglini, Marco [Author]; Harris, Jorgen M. [Other]; Patacchini, Eleonora [Other]
  • Corporation: National Bureau of Economic Research
  • Published: Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020
  • Published in: NBER working paper series ; no. w26726
  • Extent: 1 Online-Ressource; illustrations (black and white)
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.3386/w26726
  • Identifier:
  • Reproduction note: Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
  • Origination:
  • Footnote: System requirements: Adobe [Acrobat] Reader required for PDF files
    Mode of access: World Wide Web
  • Description: 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
  • Access State: Open Access