A new NBER working paper by Josh Angrist and Marc Diederichs looks at Ph.D. graduates of top Economics departments since 1994. The goal of the paper is to understand the advisor-student relationship, as part of the production function of producing top economists. In an appendix (i.e. not the main point of the paper) they produce a long table ranking effective advisors, as measured by the success of their students. I'm charmed to find that, through the magic of econometrics, they ranked me first.
A big part of my delight is that there are teachers up and down my family tree. My parents, who were both high school teachers, would have been glad to see the table (and my mom would have believed in its accuracy and robustness to alternative specifications:)
So, before I say more about the paper, here's the first page of their table (Table A2, p48-53, listing the first 180 advisors):
Now that we've gotten the important part out of the way, here's the paper:
DISSERTATION PATHS: ADVISORS AND STUDENTS IN THE ECONOMICS RESEARCH PRODUCTION FUNCTION by Joshua Angrist and Marc Diederichs, NBER Working Paper 33281, http://www.nber.org/papers/w33281
Abstract: "Elite economics PhD programs aim to train graduate students for a lifetime of academic research. This
paper asks how advising affects graduate students’ post-PhD research
productivity. Advising is highly concentrated: at the eight
highly-selective schools in our study, a minority of advisors do most of
the advising work. We quantify advisor attributes such as an
advisor’s own research output and aspects of the advising relationship
like coauthoring and research field affinity that might contribute to
student research success. Students advised by research-active, prolific advisors tend to publish more, while coauthoring has no effect. Student-advisor research affinity also predicts student success.
But a school-level aggregate production function provides much weaker
evidence of causal effects, suggesting that successful advisors attract
students likely to succeed–without necessarily boosting their students’
chances of success. Evidence for causal effects is strongest for a measure of advisors’ own research output. Aggregate
student research output appears to scale linearly with graduate student
enrollment, with no evidence of negative class-size effects. An
analysis of gender differences in research output shows male and female
graduate students to be equally productive in the first few years
post-PhD, but female productivity peaks sooner than male productivity. "
"
Why do so few highly-selected elite program graduates follow the path
to research success taken by their extraordinarily successful advisors?
What aspects of economics advisee training might be
changed or enhanced so as to boost graduate student success and total research output?
These
questions motivate our study of the economics PhD education production
function at elite universities. The principal production inputs in this
function are the faculty who teach and advise graduate students, along
with aspects of the advising relationship that faculty and students
develop together."
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Yesterday's post: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 Inputs to academic productivity, Part 1: Socioeconomic background (by Abramitzky et al.)
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