Climbing the Ivory Tower: How Socio-Economic Background Shapes Academia

with Ran Abramitzky (Stanford University), Lena Greska (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich), Santiago Peréz (University of California, Davis), Joseph Price (Brigham Young University) and Fabian Waldinger (IZA Institute of Labor Economics)

This paper explores the impact of socio-economic background on academic careers in the United States. We construct a novel dataset that links the near-universe of US academics to full-count censuses, allowing for a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between parental occupation, socio-economic status, and academic outcomes. We document a severe underrepresentation of children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds among academics. We also document significant variations in socio-economic selectivity by academic discipline and university. Conditional on making it to academia, there are no differences in careers and scientific productivity, indicating that the initial selection process may play a crucial role in determining one‘s academic success. Additionally, we show that socioeconomic background influences a scientist‘s choice of subfield and, thereby, the direction of research.