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14.04.2025 | DFG-Projekt

Prolific PhD advisors are no guarantee of graduate student research success

In their VoxEU column ‘Prolific PhD advisors are no guarantee of graduate student research success’, Josh Angrist and Marc Diederichs take a close look at the astonishing fact that half of the graduates of top degree programmes publish next to nothing in the years following their graduation.

A VoxEU column by  Josh Angrist and Marc Diederichs studies the role of PhD advisors at eight elite schools, including Harvard, MIT, and Stanford, and find that students guided by prolific advisors (in the sense of having many advisees) publish more frequently, but at the school level, there is surprisingly little evidence that superstar advisors boost student success. The findings also challenge conventional wisdom about economics graduate education: larger cohorts are no less successful than smaller cohorts.

The authors sum up: "a broader lesson suggested by our findings is that research success is hard for elite schools to engineer or even predict."

VoxEU – CEPR’s policy portal – promotes "research-based policy analysis and commentary by leading economists". VoxEU columns cover all fields of economics broadly defined and are widely read.

Marc Diederichs, Senior Research Officer at ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin & Postdoctoral Researcher in Economics University of Passau is member of the DFG research group "multiple competition in higher education".

Link to: Prolific PhD advisors are no guarantee of graduate student research success