FISHES, PONDS, AND PRODUCTIVITY: STUDENT-ADVISOR MATCHING AND EARLY CAREER PUBLISHING SUCCESS FOR ECONOMICS PHDS

I. INTRODUCTION Research productivity is an important concern for members of the academe. Publishing success is important for individual departments because more productive faculty increases the department's research profile, which in turn increases the department's professional reputation. As evidence, Thursby (2000) and Ehrenberg and Hurst (1998) find that a department's reputation in the National Research Council (NRC) ratings increases with published research, while Smyth (1999) finds that pages published in the top 5 journals have a greater impact than pages published in other journals. Publishing success is important for individual faculty members because peer-reviewed publications have long been shown to be economic currency for academic economists (Bratsberg, Ragan, and Warren 2003; Moore, Newman, and Turnbull 1998; Sauer 1988 among others). Research promise is important for graduate students because students with the greatest promise for productive careers are likely to receive the best initial job placements (Buchmueller, Dominitz, and Hansen 1999; Krueger and Wu 2000; Long 1978). Indeed, according to a survey of hiring departments (Carson and Navarro 1988), every single top 20 domestic economics program considered the quality of one's research agenda to be of moderate to great importance in the hiring decision. An important question then is how to identify which factors are associated with the likelihood of having a more productive research career. To date, empirical studies have focused on the program from which the student graduated (recent examples include Collins, Cox, and Stango 2000; Davis, Huston, and Patterson 2001; Stock and Alston 2000). This focus implicitly assumes that because only the very best students become enrolled in elite programs, graduates of highly ranked programs should hold the greatest promise for publishing success. (1) In support, Coupe (2001) and Buchmueller, Dominitz, and Hansen (1999) find that students graduating from top programs are more likely to publish in core economics journals, while Hogan (1981) finds that students graduating from programs with more active faculty publish more journal articles. Before placing total faith in these results, however, members of the academe should ask whether such findings hold across all points in the graduate distribution or whether they are only accurate predictors on average. Previously published data clearly suggest the latter. For instance, Buchmueller, Dominitz, and Hansen (1999) find that 30% of Tier 1 graduates do not publish any academic articles within the first 9 yr after PhD receipt, while 50% do not publish any top 50 articles (as defined by Liebowitz and Palmer 1984). In other words, there is a "large amount of unexplained variability" in the future success of a program's graduates (Krueger and Wu 2000, 93). Consequently, it is likely that significant overlap exists between the performance of top program graduates and lesser program graduates, with significant portions of the latter outperforming significant portions of the former. With this in mind, the question becomes: is there a readily observable factor that is a less noisy predictor of a student's likelihood for publishing success? We argue that there is. During a student's postgraduate education, one of the most significant influences is his or her dissertation advisor. We posit that for timing reasons, advisors will possess additional insight into a student's true research potential that was not available to the admission committee when deciding whether to admit the student into the program. Consequently, we expect a student's dissertation advisor to be a more informed predictor of his or her early career productivity than the program from which he or she receives the PhD. (2) In other words we believe that considering the identity of a student's dissertation advisor in addition to the quality of the program from which the student receives the PhD should help reduce the uncertainty inherent in predicting the student's position within the early career productivity distribution. …