Nerd News: Nazi-Era University Policy and Grad Student Impact

Here is some new research from the University of Warwick (via Inside Higher Ed).  Blurb:

An economist's research into the Nazi regime's dismissals of Jewish mathematics professors in the 1930's has led him to conclude that in Ph.D. supervision, big is beautiful.

Between 1933 and 1934, about 18 per cent of all mathematics professors in Germany were stripped of their posts by the Nazis, including some of the most eminent scholars of the day. Fabian Waldinger, assistant professor in the department of economics at the University of Warwick, in Britain, studied the impact of those dismissals on the mathematicians' doctoral students.He found that the students whose subsequent careers were most adversely affected by the dismissals were those who had been supervised by highly cited professors.

This seems obvious, doesn't it?  And yet ... Check out some of the findings and analysis here (in PDF). Anyway, did I really have to remind you that the Nazi policy of purging scholars was both evil and stupid?

I give you the abstract here (warning: it's in Nerdish by an economist, so the language is Double Nerdish):

Quality Matters: 

The Expulsion of Professors and the Consequences 

for Ph.D. Student Outcomes in Nazi Germany

Fabian Waldinger (University of Warwick)

I investigate the effect of faculty quality on Ph.D. student outcomes. To address the endogeneity of faculty quality I use exogenous variation provided by the expulsion of mathematics professors in Nazi Germany. I …find that faculty quality is a very important determinant of short and long run Ph.D. student outcomes. A one standard deviation increase in faculty quality increases theprobability of publishing the dissertation in a top journal by 13 percentage points, the probability of becoming full professor by 10 percentage points, the probability of having positive lifetime citations by 16 percentage points, and the number of lifetime citations by 6.3.