On the Relationship between the Student–Advisor Match and Early Career Research Productivity for Agricultural and Resource Economics Ph.D.s

We use a unique data set on students receiving their Ph.D.s from top-ranked agricultural and resource economics programs to investigate how the ranking of a student's dissertation advisor affects his or her early career research productivity. After controlling for program reputation, we find that the higher the relative research productivity of a student's dissertation advisor the greater the student's early career research productivity. Allowing the estimated effects of advisor rank to vary with program reputation suggests that students from lower-ranked programs working with relatively more prominent advisors outperform their peers at highly ranked programs working with less prominent advisors.