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.