For the journal Economics of Education Review, CRA’s Arpita Patnaik with her coauthors Gwyn Pauley, Joanna Venator and Matthew Wiswall have written the paper “The impacts of same and opposite gender alumni speakers on interest in economics,” evaluating the impact of male and female alumni speaker interventions in introductory microeconomics courses on student interest in economics. Using student-level transcript data, the authors estimate the effect of speakers in models using untreated lectures as control groups, including professor and semester-year fixed effects and student-level covariates.
They have found that alumni speakers increase intermediate economics course take-up by 1.7-2.1 percentage points (9-12%). Students are more responsive to same-gender speakers, with male speakers increasing men’s course take-up by 36%-38% and female speakers increasing women’s course take-up by 37-40% implying that the effect of alumni speakers is strongly gendered.