RSSE: Ola Andersson (Uppsala University) Are Students Roadblocks to Academic Diversity? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment
| Začátek: | čtvrtek 13. listopadu 2025, 12:45 |
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| Konec: | čtvrtek 13. listopadu 2025, 14:15 |
| Jazyk události: | angličtina |
| Místo konání: | RB 436 |
| Online událost: | Microsoft Teams |
| Kontaktní osoba: | Lubomír Cingl |
| Tagy: | #doktorandi #phd #phdstudents #research #rsse #seminars #zamestnanci |
It is our pleasure that Ola Andersson (Uppsala University) will present on Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 12:45 in room RB436 about the topic “Are Students Roadblocks to Academic Diversity? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment”.
Registration is not required and anyone who would like to attend is warmly invited.
It is also possible to participate online via MS Teams at this link. In case of any connection issues, please contact lubomir.cingl@vse.cz.
ABSTRACT: This paper provides the first revealed-preference evidence on how students respond to increased teacher diversity, holding other aspects of teacher quality constant. We used fictive teacher names (immigrant/native; male/female) as a salient attribute of the list of otherwise identical elective classes in economics. We find a robust same-type bias in preferences for teachers. The same-type biases are significant on the full sample but stronger among low-skilled and female students. Our results point to an intersectional mechanism; students are significantly less likely to select classes led by a teacher of the opposite gender \emph{and} ethnicity, implying that the students’ same-sex bias primarily affects ethnic minority teachers. While the ethnicity bias is robust to default nudging, elevating the opposite gender as the default option reduces or even eliminates the selection bias. We also show that, due to this bottom-up discrimination, underrepresented teachers may receive significantly weaker students under standard admission systems.
BIO: Ola Andersson received his doctorate in economics in 2008 at Lund University. Between 2008 and 2011 he was a researcher at the Stockholm School of Economics and between 2012 and 2016 he was a research affiliate at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN) in Stockholm. He is currently Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, Uppsala University and affiliated to IFN.
