Please join us for an Economics Department Seminar Series event on Friday, April 9th from 3:10-4:30 PM EST.  

Dr. James West of Baylor University will present his paper:

“The Impact of Chief Diversity Officers on Diverse Faculty Hiring”

(brief discussion and Q&A to follow). 

Bio

Dr. West is the W.H. Smith Professor of Economics at Baylor University and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research interests are in the fields of economics of education, social network formation, public economics, and applied econometrics. Here please find links to his his CV and website.

The paper to be presented can be found here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w24969

Abstract

Increasingly, U.S. universities are hiring high-profile executive-level Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) to increase diversity further. The effectiveness of this strategy is untested to date. We combine unique data collected in the initial hiring of a CDO with publicly available faculty demographic data for selected four-year U.S. universities from 2001 to 2018. We find mixed evidence of the effects of a CDO on underrepresented hires. We find evidence that the presence of a CDO may substantially boost the probability that a non-tenured faculty or administrator hire is underrepresented in universities that are already somewhat diverse. However, we cannot find significant effects of a CDO on diversity for tenure-track and tenured faculty hires.

Please join us via ZOOM at:

https://lehigh.zoom.us/j/92246757275