Diversity in Economics Seminars: Who Gives Invited Talks?

摘要

In economics, as in many other academic disciplines, it is common for departments to invite external speakers to give research talks in academic seminars. These invited seminars are a primary way that academic economists (ⅰ) get feedback on their work, (ⅱ) disseminate their work, and (ⅲ) expand their professional networks. Given research on the importance of role model effects, the composition of invited seminar speakers coming through a department may also affect the trajectories of graduate students and junior faculty in that department (see, for example, Porter and Serra 2020). Despite the central role that invited seminars play in the economics discipline, we know little about who gives these seminar talks. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of invited seminar speakers, using a balanced panel of 66 economics and economics-adjacent departments from August 2014 through December 2019. Our data are the result of a multiyear, ongoing effort to collect this information from the websites of a broad range of departments in the United States and abroad.