The role of social proximity in professional CEO appointments: Evidence from caste/religion‐based hiring of CEOs in India

Abstract

Research Summary: The role of homophily in CEO appointments at the largest corporations is an important subject in corporate governance. This subject is particularly important in a country like India where a multitude of religions, castes, and communities form its social fabric. We test for the role of homophily in professional CEO appointments in India by empirically examining the preference for same caste/religion CEOs by the largest firms. Using a unique dataset, assembled by detailed identification of castes/religions from family names and counterfactuals obtained through the Coarsened Exact Matching technique, we find that caste/religion plays a crucial role in CEO selection as a source of information (positive discrimination). The evidence is not consistent with its use to pursue taste-based preferences (negative discrimination). Managerial Summary: We test for the role of homophily in the appointments of CEOs in India by empirically examining the preference for same caste/religion CEOs by the largest firms. We find that caste/religion plays an important role in CEO selection, i.e., as a form of information or "positive discrimination." The evidence is not consistent with its use to pursue taste-based preferences or "negative discrimination."

Intersectional Inequalities and Invisibilization in Organizations: The Case of Indian Beauty and Wellness Services

“…Although management literature has examined gendered inequalities (Acker, 1990;McCarthy, Soundararajan, & Taylor, 2020;Pullen & Rhodes, 2015), racial inequalities (Al Ariss, Özbilgin, Tatli, & April, 2014;Johnson, 2009;Nkomo, 1992), and more recently caste inequalities (Bapuji & Chrispal, 2020;Chen, Chittoor, & Vissa, 2015;Damaraju & Makhija, 2018) within organizations, we observe that mainstream management research on intersectional inequalities is scattered. Theoretically speaking, the invisibilization of intersectional inequalities hasn't been understood enough, and little work has tried to explain the complex relationship between the visible and invisible aspects of intersectional inequalities within organizations, where different forms of inequalities interact to produce layers of vulnerability and precarity among employees.…”

Service Activity and Patented Innovation in Manufacturing Firms

“…Both the CEM procedure and IV estimation used in our analyses are capable of handling survivorship bias and have been applied in prior literature to this issue (Greene, 2017: 245). However, as a further robustness check, we followed the literature to minimize survivorship bias by only keeping recent service adopters (following Damaraju and Makhija, 2018) or financially strong firms at low risk of bankruptcy (following Lafontaine et al., 2019). The results remained unchanged (§EC10).…”

Ethnic minority CEO turnover: Resource‐based and leadership categorization perspectives

“…First, we ran each incoming CEO's family name through a computer program, NamePrism, that identifies the geographic origin of the name (Ye et al, 2017; Ye & Skiena, 2019). Recent examples of other research that uses family names to identify ethnicity include the following: Damaraju and Makhija (2018), Lamare (2016), Clark et al (2015), and Peterson et al (2011). The NamePrism program yields Asian, Hispanic, and “Other” (mostly Middle Eastern) groups of CEOs.…”