In-group favoritism in grant evaluation processes

with Nicola Fuchs-Schündeln

We study in-group favoritism in the evaluation of grant proposals, focusing on gender and nationality in the European Research Council (ERC) funding process. Using data on over 37,000 proposals and the structure of ERC reviews, we find that individual reviewers tend to give higher scores to applicants who share their nationality or gender. Nationality-based favoritism is particularly strong while gender-based favoritism is smaller but still significant. These patterns persist after accounting for reviewer characteristics and proposal-reviewer topic match. At the level of final panel decisions—where reviewer scores are aggregated and discussed—we find weaker and more mixed evidence of in-group favoritism, with some persistence of nationality bias but little effect for gender.