Partisan University Governance

Emanuele Colonnelli, Assistant Professor of Finance, Liew Family Junior Faculty Fellow and Fama Faculty Fellow
Elisabeth Kempf, Associate Professor of Finance

The project aims to understand the extent to which political partisanship has infiltrated university governance. We plan to collect information on the governing board members of universities and colleges in the United States, and to match these data to individual-level party affiliations using voter registration data and political contributions. Whereas the latter data – voter registrations and political contributions – have already been collected, we require funds to purchase a large-scale dataset on the governing board members of universities and colleges, which we intend to complement with a manual data collection effort. We further plan to study the consequences of politicized trusteeship on the productivity and mobility of star academics.