The Role of Connections in Academic Promotions
By N. Zinovyeva, Manuel F. Bagüés. Social Science Research Network, 2014
132 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This paper analyzes the role of connections in academic promotions. We exploit evidence from centralized evaluations in Spain, where evaluators are randomly assigned to promotion committees. We find that prior connections between candidates and evaluators have a dramatic impact on candidates’ success. For instance, the presence of a co-author or an advisor in the committee is equivalent to a standard deviation increase in candidates’ research output. The effect of a weaker link, such as a member of candidate’s doctoral thesis committee, is one fourth as large. The source of the premium enjoyed by connected candidates depends on the nature of their relationship with committee members. In the case of weak links, informational gains tend to dominate evaluation biases. Candidates promoted by a weak link turn out to be more productive in the future relative to other promoted candidates. However, consistently with the existence of cronyism, candidates promoted by a strong connection exhibit a significantly worse research record both before and after the evaluation.
Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dfc4f0e9bbab6c64b86297d5f682cf0e9a4c4039
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Citations in the corpus
- Does the Gender Composition of Scientific Committees Matter? (2017, methodology): “If evaluators are mostly male, male candidates might have a better chance to be acquainted with committee members and could perhaps benefit from these connections (Zinovyeva and Bagues 2015; Bagues, Sylos-Labini, Zinovyeva 2015).”