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要旨:
The effect of social capital is often overrated because contacts and centrality can be a
consequence of success rather than its cause. Randomized or natural experiments are
an excellent way to assess the real causal effect of social capital, but these are rare. This
paper relies on data from one such experiment: recruitment at the EHESS, a leading social
science institution in France, between 1960 and 2005. The EHESS recruitment process
uses an electoral commission to produce a first-stage ranking of applicants, which
is then provided to the faculty assembly for final voting. The commission is partly composed
of faculty members drawn at random, a feature that this article exploits in order
to compare the chances for success of applicants whose contacts have been drawn to
sit on the commission (treated) versus those whose contacts have not been drawn (control).
It shows that a contact such as a PhD advisor has a causal impact, especially for
assistant professor hiring exams: it doubles the chance of being ranked and increases
the share of votes by 10 percent. This phenomenon may explain part of the classic “academic
inbreeding” issue.
