Faculty Research Activity and the Quality of Graduate Training

This study examines the relationships between program size, the quality of entrants and of the faculty, the faculty's published research output, and the average quality of the PhDs during the 1960s trained by the top 36 U.S. graduate programs in economics. The empirical evidence supports the hypotheses (1) that faculty research activity contributes positively to the quality of graduate training, and (2) that the quality of the input to a PhD program-that is, the quality of entering students-is significantly related to quality of the PhDs produced by that program.