Judging the paper by its cover: affiliation bias in conference admissions

Connections predict career success across many occupations, including academia, where conference participation builds professional networks. This paper experimentally tests whether academic affiliation influences conference acceptance. Using a matched-pair field experiment during the review phase of an early-career economics workshop, we randomly assign papers with and without author affiliations to reviewers. We find a strong bias favoring prestigious institutions, reducing diversity by lowering the representation of women and first-generation graduates. This bias is primarily driven by in-group favoritism from reviewers at similarly ranked institutions. Our findings highlight how affiliation bias reinforces inequalities and limits academic diversity.