Neil Duzett

The debate surrounding diversity in organizations has intensified in recent years, spurred by claims that it enhances group decision-making and performance. Yet despite significant attention and investment, evidence on diversity’s effects, its channels, and how these depend on group characteristics remains limited. This paper provides new evidence on diversity in the U.S. city council setting. Leveraging quasi-random victories in close elections between different-race candidates, I use a regression discontinuity design to estimate the impact of racial diversity on city council communication and effectiveness. Applying natural language topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to 17,000 city council meeting transcripts, I show that diversity shifts council discussion topics, and also heightens communication frictions – increasing negativity in council meetings by 66%. Consistent with predictions from existing theories and experiments on diversity in groups of varying sizes, diversity's effect on communication frictions is particularly strong in smaller councils. These competing communication effects are reflected in diversity’s effects on two measures of council effectiveness: council racial diversity improves incumbent vote shares by 6.7 points and increases local house prices by 3% within one election term for larger councils (who experience fewer frictions), while smaller councils see no gains in either measure. These results suggest that communication plays a key role in determining the effectiveness of diverse groups.

We examine the transmission of lifespan across generations in the US using a unique dataset containing more than 26 million individuals born between 1880 and 1920. On average, 47 percent of men and 57 percent of women lived longer than their parents, though this varied across cohorts and socio-economic groups. The intergenerational persistence in lifespan is low across cohorts and socio-economic groups, and it is much smaller than persistence in socio-economic status. Moreover, persistence in lifespan and in socio-economic status are independent of each other. Lifetime well-being, which combines socioeconomic and lifespan measures, is less persistent than socio-economic measures suggest.

Using national data on local government elections in the U.S., I show that in close contests, candidates who do not match the majority gender of current officeholders are systematically disadvantaged. Near the victory cutoff, these candidates are 1.9 times as likely to lose as win. This gender penalty affects both women and men and is present in elections for city councils, school boards, and county legislatures. Evidence suggests the effect may be mediated by current officeholders steering campaign donations toward candidates who match their own gender. These findings highlight how those in power can shape the compositions of future leadership.