Networks and power: gender effects of random selection into an administrative elite.
A study conducted with Bernhard Ganglmair, professor of economy, University of Mannheim and ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research à Mannheim (Germany), Nicola Persico, professor, Northwestern University, Chicago (US), research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, US), Timothy Simcoe, Associate professor, Boston University(US), research associate at National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, US), Emanuele Tarantino, Professor, Luiss Guido Carli Free International University for Social Studies (Rome, Italy), Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance (EIEF, Rom, Italy) & Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) .
The goal of the proposal is to advance our understanding of how role models from disadvantaged groups impact the participation of minority members in a community. We will study gender role models in the context of Internet standards’ development at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Without these standards, the Internet would not work. Hence, within this context, underrepresentation of women in positions of leadership is highly societally relevant.
Our empirical setting combines three unique features.
First, we exploit exogenous variation in the gender composition of IETF’s “selectorate” , i.e. the committee that chooses the organization’s leaders. This committee is called NomCom, and NomCom’s members are the role models in our analysis. Because the IETF’s decisions have enormous technological and financial implications, many companies seek to place employees in leadership roles. Since NomCom's decisions have important consequences for the organization and its functioning, they are highly visible and heavily scrutinized.
Second, NomCom’s members are randomly selected each year from a pool of volunteers. This gives us random variation in the gender composition of the selection committee.
Third, the radical transparency of IETF’s procedures and institutions allows us to collect individual-level information on measures of IETF’s members engagement, like the
stock of published Internet standards, the number of emails sent to IETF listservs, and the number of IETF meetings attended.
Overall, these three features put us in the ideal position to study the causal effect of random variation in the composition of role models on women participation in the IETF.
Researchers
Professor Emanuele Tarantino teaches Corporate Finance and Energy Economics in the Department of Economics and Finance. He is a research affiliate of the CEPR, and a member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy of the European Commission Chief Economist. He holds a PhD in Economics from the European University Institute (Florence) and, before joining Luiss, he held positions at the University of Mannheim and the University of Bologna. His research interests are in industrial organization, financial economics, and innovation. He has published in The Journal of Financial Economics, The Review of Financial Studies, and The RAND Journal of Economics.
I am an Assistant Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from the Center for Doctoral Studies in Economics (CDSE), University of Mannheim, in August 2020. My research interests are in Empirical Industrial Organization, Innovation and Organizational Economics.
Bernhard Ganglmair is head of ZEW’s Junior Research Group “Competition and Innovation” and professor of economics at the University of Mannheim. He is also member of the board of the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI) and member of the working group Competition Economics of the German Federal Cartel Office. Prior to joining ZEW, he was an assistant professor of managerial economics at the University of Texas at Dallas. In the past, he taught at the University of Linz, Austria, and Northeastern University in Boston, US. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy, Haifa University in Israel, and Boston University. His research covers a variety of topics related to technology standardization and patents, trade secrets, competition economics, contracts, and the economic analysis of law more generally.
His work is both theoretical and empirical in nature and has been published in the RAND Journal of Economics, the Journal of Industrial Economics, the Journal of Law and Economics, and the Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization. He is an Associate Editor at the International Journal of Industrial Organization and at Economic Inquiry. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and an undergraduate degree in business and economics from the University of Linz in Austria.
Nicola Persico is the John L. and Helen Kellogg Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Persico has published in the areas of political economy, law and economics, and labor economics. His current research interests include contract theory, economics of organizations, political economy/design, labor economics, microeconomics, and game theory.
Timothy S. Simcoe is a Professor of Strategy and Innovation at the Boston University Questrom School of Business, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. From 2014 to 2015, he served as a Senior Economist on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Professor Simcoe’s research focuses on standards, innovation and technology policy, intellectual property and corporate strategy. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, Management Science, the RAND Journal of Economics, Organization Science and the Journal of Applied Econometrics. He is an associate editor at Management Science and the Journal of Industrial Economics. In 2012 served on a National Academy of Sciences Committee to evaluate Intellectual Property Management in Standard-Setting Processes. Dr. Simcoe holds a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from Harvard, along with an M.A. in Economics and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.