Anna Bindler, Barbara Boelmann, Lena Janys, Luisa H. Santiago Wolf
arXiv 22 Jun 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2606.23150 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
How do labor demand shocks affect workforce diversity in the absence of targeted diversity policies? A conceptual framework illustrates the potential trade-off between the demographic and quality composition of a workforce when there is a positive labor demand shock. Exploiting the German reunification as a natural experiment, we analyze the academic labor market where nearly all social sciences professors in East Germany were replaced while STEM faculty remained largely unchanged. Using administrative data and a regional difference-in-differences design, we find increased dispersion in the institutional quality of hires, indicating that the new hires came from less select departments. At the same time, female representation did not increase despite qualified women in the pipeline. Instead, East German hiring patterns converged to those in West Germany in terms of gender composition. In simulations, we investigate implied losses: Under conservative assumptions, we show that, considering the pipeline of qualified applicants, the marginal female hire's quality is approximately half a standard deviation higher than the marginal male hire's quality.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Statistisches Bundesamt (1998) Personal- und Stellenstatistik | 0.935 | 11 | 5 | 82% |
| 2 | Iaria, Alessandro and Schwarz, Carlo and Waldinger, Fabian Gender Gaps in Academia: Global Evidence Over the Twentieth Century | 0.928 | 4 | 3 | 100% |
| 3 | Statistisches Bundesamt Fachserie 11 Reihe 4.4: Personal an Hochschulen, Ausgaben 1980–1990 | 0.843 | 4 | 3 | 75% |
| 4 | Bethmann, Dirk and Bransch, Felix and Kvasnicka, Michael and Sadrieh… (2023) Home Bias in Top Economics Journals | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 5 | Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Dissertationen und Habilitationen im Katalog der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Janys, Lena Testing the Presence of Implicit Hiring Quotas with Application to German Universities self | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Waldinger, Fabian Quality Matters: The Expulsion of Professors and the Consequences for PhD Student Outcomes in Nazi Germany | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | G\ (2010) Deutsche Universit\ | 0.585 | 3 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | Pasternack, Peer (1998) Demokratische Erneuerung | 0.585 | 3 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Barbara Boelmann (2024) Women's Missing Mobility and the Gender Gap in Higher Education: Evidence from Germany's University Expansion self | 0.511 | 2 | 2 | 50% |
Showing the top 10 of 81 scored citations.