The Finance Brown Bag Seminar is held by the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance (WU Vienna) and the Vienna Graduate School of Finance (VGSF). It serves as a presentation platform for PhD students, faculty members, and visitors. An overview of BBS on the website of the Institute for Finance, Banking and Insurance.
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Pietro Veronesi, University of Chicago, NBER, and CEPR
Self-image Bias and Lost Talent
We propose an overlapping-generation model wherein researchers belong to two groups, M or F, and established researchers evaluate new researchers. Group imbalance obtains even with group-neutral evaluations and identical productivity distributions. Evaluators’ self-image bias and mild between-group heterogeneity in equally productive research characteristics lead the initially dominant group, say M, to promote scholars similar to them. Promoted F-researchers are few and similar to M-researchers, perpetuating imbalance. Consistently with the data, our mechanism also predicts stronger and widening group imbalance in top institutions; higher quality of accepted F-researchers; clustering of M- and F-researchers across different fields; greater imbalance for seniors than juniors; less credit for F-researchers in co-authored work; and established researchers’ false perception that increasing F-representation reduces quality. Policy-wise, mentorship reduces group imbalance, but increases F-group talent loss. Affirmative action reduces both.
