Menaka Hampole, assistant professor of finance, has won the Western Finance Association’s Best Empirical Finance Paper award for her working paper “Peer Effects and the Gender Gap in Corporate Leadership: Evidence from MBA Students.”
The annual award is sponsored by Wharton Research Data Services, an institute housed at the Wharton School that supports quantitative business research.
The paper, which Hampole co-authored with Francesca Truffa of the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business and Ashley Wong of Tilburg University, examines the role of informal social connections in women’s representation in corporate leadership positions. Using administrative data from top U.S. business schools and publicly available LinkedIn profiles, the authors found that women are more likely to enter senior management positions if they attend business school alongside a larger proportion of female peers. Hampole and her colleagues then surveyed women alumni MBA alumni to illuminate three possible mechanisms at play in MBA cohorts with higher female representation: information sharing, especially related to gender-specific advice; higher ambitions and self-confidence; and increased support from male MBA peers.
Hampole joined the SOM faculty in 2023 after earning her PhD from the Kellog School of Management at Northwestern University. Her research is focused on the intersection of household finance and labor economics, with a special interest in education.