The productivity of science & engineering PhD students hired from supervisors’ networks

Stefano Baruffaldi, Fabiana Visentin and Annamaria Conti

Research Policy, 2016, vol. 45, issue 4, 785-796

Abstract: We compare the scientific productivity of PhD students who are hired from a fine-grained set of mutually exclusive affiliation types: a PhD supervisor's affiliation, an external affiliation from which the supervisor derives her coauthors, and an external affiliation with which the supervisor has no coauthorship ties. Using a novel dataset of science and engineering PhD students who graduated from two major Swiss universities, we find that the most productive PhD category is the one made of students who are affiliated with universities other than their supervisors’ affiliation, but from which the PhD supervisors derive their coauthors. This result suggests an inverted U-shaped relationship between PhD students’ productivity and the social distance from their supervisors. Additionally, we find evidence consistent with the role of supervisors’ coauthor networks in resolving information asymmetries regarding PhD talent.

Keywords: Scientific productivity; PhD students; Supervisors’ networks (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 I2 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733315002000
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:45:y:2016:i:4:p:785-796

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2015.12.006

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().