A Missed Opportunity? Labor Demand and Workforce Diversity

Anna Bindler, Barbara Boelmann and Lena Janys and Luisa H. Santiago Wolf

No 2169, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Labor demand; diversity; higher education; universities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 J23 J45 J70 J82 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 p.
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-lma
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