Sharing common roots: Student-graduate committee matching and job market outcomes

This paper investigates the impact of student-graduate committee matching, in the form of country of origin and native language, on students' initial placement outcomes in the economics PhD job market. We utilize manually collected data on the identities and research profiles of both the candidates and their graduate committee members to identify the student-committee pairs with relevant matches. Our findings suggest that for international students, having at least one committee member from the same country of origin or at least one that speaks the same native language increases the chances of being placed into a tenure track academic job and being at an institution with higher research productivity, as measured by the research rankings in the Research Papers in Economics database. A closer examination of the results shows that these effects are primarily driven by matches from Chinese speaking students with their corresponding committee members.