The Impact of Research Performance on Students’ Evaluations of Strategy Professors in Business Schools

We examine whether a strategy professor’s research performance affects students’ evaluations in the business school classroom. We build a novel dataset of students’ evaluations of 922 strategic management courses in a top-ranked business school in Spain during the period 2011–2016 and link it to the publication outcome of each professor. We find a significant positive association between research performance, measured by the number of publications in a 6-year interval, and students’ evaluations of teaching. Specifically, an increase of two standard deviations in our variable for research performance is equivalent to a jump from the median of students’ evaluations to the top quartile. Also, publishing four papers within 6 years significantly increases the likelihood that the professor’s students in a required course will subsequently choose strategy elective courses. We also find a positive and strongly significant interaction of research performance with course length, suggesting that the benefits of research may emerge specifically in longer courses.