Resumen de Diversity, social goods provision, and performance in the firm

Sara Fisher Ellison, Wallace P. Mullin

• Economists have studied the effect of diversity on the provision of social goods and the stock of social capital. In parallel, management scholars have studied the effect of diversity in the workplace on firm performance. We integrate these two growing literatures and explore these questions with a unique dataset. A firm provided eight years of individual-level employee survey data, which include measures of the stock of social capital, plus office-level measures of diversity and performance. We find some evidence that more gender-homogeneous offices enjoy higher levels of social goods provision but those offices do not perform any better and may actually perform worse.