Research
Working Papers
Female Promotions and the Academic Pipeline: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
Joint with Manuel Bagues, Giulia Vattuone, Natalia Zinovyeva
We study how faculty promotion decisions shape women’s careers and the academic pipeline, using data from 4,000 Spanish university departments across all disciplines. We identify exogenous variation in promotions using the random assignment of evaluators to promotion committees between 2002 and 2008: applicants whose committees included a co-author or colleague were significantly more likely to qualify for promotion. We document two main findings. First, failing to obtain tenure has asymmetrically lasting consequences for women. Those who narrowly miss tenure are 57 percentage points less likely to be tenured fifteen years later, compared to 29 percentage points for men. Second, when women do obtain tenure, the effects extend well beyond their own careers: promoting a woman to Associate Professor increases female faculty by 1.5 members after 15 years, leads to six additional female PhD graduates over the following decade, and raises the number who subsequently remain in academia and reach tenured positions.
Presentations:
- 2026 — Research on Monday, Erasmus School of Economics; Tinbergen Institute Opening Conference: Science for Society
- 2025 — PhD Seminar, Erasmus School of Economics; PhD Seminar, Tinbergen Institute
Top Researchers on Scientific Committees: Decision Outcomes, Peer Dynamics, and Opportunity Costs
Joint with Natalia Zinovyeva
Paul David Best Junior Paper Award, Workshop on the Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research (2026)
Science disproportionately relies on top researchers to evaluate the work of others, potentially diverting their scarce time from producing new knowledge. Using random assignment of evaluators in Italy’s national academic promotion system, we show that committees with better-published members select candidates who subsequently receive more citations and experience faster career advancement. Better-published evaluators also change committee dynamics: they raise peers’ effort and induce convergence toward more impact-focused evaluation criteria, consistent with reputational pressures. Committee service, however, carries opportunity costs. Serving on a two-year committee reduces evaluators’ own publication output by about 20% of a typical year’s production, with particularly large effects for highly productive researchers working in small teams. These findings suggest that evaluation systems that account for peer effects and heterogeneous opportunity costs – through committee design and service allocation – can improve evaluation efficiency while reducing the overall burden on science.
Presentations:
- 2026 — Workshop on the Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research, Politecnico di Milano
- 2025 — UK Department for Education; PhD Seminar, Erasmus School of Economics; Brown Bag Seminar, Erasmus School of Economics
Works in Progress
Connections in Academia: Are there gender differences in networking?
Female researchers, on average, publish fewer articles than men. This may partly be due to differences in collaboration networks. I study gender differences in the formation of new collaborations using a large-scale natural experiment, where researchers are randomly assigned to serve together on Italian national evaluation committees. Pairs who sit on the same committee are 44% more likely to collaborate in the subsequent eight years compared to other potential pairs who were not drawn together. Despite pronounced gender differences and homophily in observational data, I find no gender differences in the likelihood of forming new collaborations and no same-sex preference when researchers meet at random. These results suggest that observed gender differences in collaboration patterns likely do not reflect taste-based discrimination or differential networking ability.
Presentations:
- 2025 — Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Workshop on the Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research, University of Strasbourg; 10th Summer School on Data and Algorithms for ST&I Studies, KU Leuven; PhD Seminar, Erasmus School of Economics
- 2024 — Network Economics Day, Tinbergen Institute
Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in Dutch firms
Joint with Anne Boring, Josse Delfgaauw