“Professional Interactions and Hiring Decisions: Evidence from the Federal Judiciary,” with Jorgen M. Harris and Eleonora Patacchini
We study 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. For our analysis, 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.
JEL Codes: J16, J82, J110
Keywords: Economics of Gender, Discrimination, Labor Force Composition