
Ethnic Similarity Helps Small Team Performance - barry-cotter
http://www.nber.org/papers/w23459#fromrss
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_pius
This submission has an editorialized, misleading title.

The actual title of this paper is "Homophily in Entrepreneurial Team
Formation" and it presents a number of results, one of which being that:
"homophily in ethnicity increases team performance _by lifting teams in bottom
quantiles to median performance quantiles, but it does not increase the chance
of being top performers._ " Very different implication from that of this
editorialized submission title.

Here's the full abstract:

 _We study the role of homophily in group formation. Using a unique dataset of
MBA students, we observe homophily in ethnicity and gender increases the
probability of forming teams by 25%. Homophily in education and past working
experience increases the probability of forming teams by 17% and 11 %
respectively. Homophily in education and working experience is stronger among
males than females. Further, we examine the causal impact of homophily on team
performance. Homophily in ethnicity increases team performance by lifting
teams in bottom quantiles to median performance quantiles, but it does not
increase the chance of being top performers. Our findings have implications
for understanding the lack of diversity in entrepreneurship and venture
capital industry._

