TY  - JOUR
AU  - Athey,Susan
AU  - Avery,Christopher
AU  - Zemsky,Peter
TI  - Mentoring and Diversity
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6496
PY  - 1998
Y2  - April 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6496
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6496.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Susan Athey
Graduate School of Business
Stanford University
655 Knight Way
Stanford, CA 94305
Tel: 650/725-8696
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: athey@fas.harvard.edu

Christopher Avery
Harvard Kennedy School of Government
79 JFK Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/496-4063
Fax: 617/496-5960
E-Mail: christopher_avery@hks.harvard.edu
AB  - This paper studies the forces which determine how diversity at a firm evolves over time.  We consider a dynamic model o a single firm with two levels of employees, the entry level and the upper level.  In each period, the firm selects a subset of the entry-level workers for promotion to the upper level.  The members of the entry-level worker pool vary in their initial ability as well as in their  type,' where type could refer to gender or cultural background.  Employees augment their initial ability by acquiring specific human capital in mentoring interactions with upper level employees.  We assume that an entry-level worker receives more mentoring when a greater proportion of upper-level workers match the entry-level worker's type.  In this model, it is optimal for the firm to consider type in addition to ability in making promotion decisions, so as to maximize the effectiveness of future mentoring.  We derived conditions under which firms attain full diversity, as well as conditions under which there are multiple steady states, so that the level of diversity depends on the firm's initial conditions.  With multiple steady states, temporary affirmative action policies can have a long-run impact on diversity levels.
ER  -