Consequences of Affirmative Action: The Impact of Hiring a Female Professor

This paper studies how appointing a female professor through affirmative action affects hiring decisions and gender attitudes of faculty. For identification I exploit the introduction of a nationwide affirmative action policy in Germany that provides subsidies to departments appointing women to permanent full professorships. Using administrative data on all academic personnel employed at German public universities, I find that exposure to a female professor increases the share of female Ph.D. students but leaves hiring of women among full professors, assistant professors, and postdoctoral researchers unaffected. The rise in female Ph.D. enrollment is driven by individuals who completed their undergraduate studies in the same department, suggesting a role model effect stemming from interaction with the newly appointed female professor. Additional findings show that after a woman joins the department, young male faculty members increase their collaboration with female colleagues, providing evidence that gender attitudes are malleable. Further, I document that research productivity and direction are unaffected by the presence of an additional woman. Finally, I estimate that approximately two-thirds of subsidized female appointments would have occurred without the program, suggesting that departments strategically utilize subsidies to hire women they would have hired anyway.

Levelling the Playing Field: Knowledge Production in the Digital Age

with Jens Oehlen

80% of all journals are not freely available--even though access to existing knowledge is crucial for pushing the research frontier. In this paper, we examine the impact of Sci-Hub, an online platform providing free access to scientific articles, on knowledge creation. Using data on 300 million geo-coded download requests, and the near-universe of scientific articles we employ an instrumented difference-in-differences design. We find that Sci-Hub has significantly changed consumption patterns of scientific works, with a substitution of references from open- to closed-access publications. In turn, greater access to frontier knowledge resulted in higher-quality research output as measured by citations, but not more publications.

Extracting Organs, Losing Motivation? The Response of Medical Staff to Corruption News 

with Alida Sangrigoli, Giuseppe Sorrenti, and Gilberto Turati

This paper examines how media coverage of corruption scandals influences the behavior of public healthcare workers, specifically ICU medical staff involved in organ procurement. Using Italy’s National Health Service as a case study, we investigate the behavioral responses of medical staff to two corruption scandals—one involving a hospital manager and the other a surgeon. By employing a difference-in-differences strategy across regions with varied exposure to media coverage, we isolate the impact of corruption-related news on reported organ donors. Our findings indicate that media coverage of the surgeon scandal, but not the manager scandal, significantly reduces reported donors, likely due to heightened sensitivity among staff to corruption within their professional ranks. Additional text analysis reveals no substantial semantic differences in reporting between the two scandals, suggesting that the observed effects stem from the shared professional mission among ICU staff rather than from media bias. The results underscore the indirect costs of corruption on public sector performance, with potential negative welfare implications for organ donation rates.