Do Women and Non-economists Add Diversity to Research in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics?

We examine whether interdisciplinary collaboration and the gender diversity of a profession affect scholarly research practices. Our analysis of four industrial relations and labor economics journals shows that decisions to exclude women and minorities, and to use gender or race as explanatory variables, are influenced by authors' gender and disciplinary training. Woman authors are less likely to exclude women from their sample, and non-economists are less likely to exclude women and minorities. While noneconomists are generally less likely to model gender and race explicitly in their empirical work, their statistical methods become more elaborate when they collaborate with economists.