The productivity of PhDs: Lazy graduate students?

The Economist reports:

“IF THE objective of graduate training in top-ranked [economics] departments is to produce successful research economists, then these graduate programmes are largely failing.” That’s the startling message from a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

How did the authors of this paper reach such a pessimistic conclusion? They look at a 14,300 people who received an economics PhD from 154 American and Canadian institutions. They then find a massive database of academic papers published over a two-decade period. From that, they are able to tell how many papers each PhD graduate has produced in the six years after leaving graduate school. (Six years, by the way, is about the average time it takes for a newly-minted PhD to get tenure).

Of course, quantity is not the only measure of success. One great paper is worth more than three bad ones. So the authors create an index that adjusts the number of publications by the quality of the journal it appears in. The authors end up with what they call the "American Economic Review­-equivalent". To get published in the AER is a dream for any economist and so other journals are indexed in relation to it. An article in the Journal of Political Economy, for instance, is worth 0.67 papers in AER. A paper in Economic Theory is worth a quarter.

Some of the results are not terribly surprising. Graduates from the big-hitting universities can be extremely productive. The graduate in the 99th percentile from Harvard or MIT—that is, right at the very top of the graduating class—produces over 4 AER-equivalent papers over six years.

An article well worth your time.