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Executive Summary
Since the 1960s, scientific academic research has played a prominent role in most leading business schools. However, recently, critics have argued that emphasizing research is misguided and may only serve faculty’s interests at the expense of students and the firms that employ them. This potential problem of misallocating resources exists in all nonprofit organizations in which various constituents with different objectives compete for resources in the absence of a unifying profit objective. Thus, our framework and approach may be relevant for other types of nonprofit organizations with multiple activities and multiple constituents. The current empirical investigation of academic research in business schools attempts to provide some evidence on whether faculty research provides benefits to business schools’ nonfaculty constituents. The authors model both the short-term and the long-term effects of academic research in 57 business schools over 18 years on academics’, recruiters’, and applicants’ perceptions as well as on the school’s education performance with current students. They find that academic research has positive, long-term effects on the perceptions of these three constituents and on education performance, as well as short-term effects on academics’ and recruiters’ perceptions. Moreover, effect sizes are large and meaningful. A persistent increase of three single-author articles per year is associated with an improvement in a school’s ranking among academics by one place, a decline in its acceptance rate of 1%, and an increase in graduates’ average annual starting salary of more than $750. These findings could begin to refute the belief that emphasizing academic research is not good for business schools’ broader educational mission. This study has five primary implications for business schools: (1) Knowledge exploration (research) and knowledge exploitation (education) are not competing activities; (2) investments in academic research increase the overall performance of an MBA program, as measured by BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, Financial Times, and other publications; (3) both highly ranked business schools and less highly ranked business schools benefit from more academic research; (4) business school administrators must make long-term commitments to increasing research to benefit from such a strategy; and (5) longer tenures for deans may promote these long-term commitments. Beyond business schools, this study illustrates the importance of evaluating an activity’s impact on multiple constituents (especially in nonprofit organizations, in which activities cannot be evaluated against a common profit metric) and the importance of evaluating both short-term and long-term effects.

Biography
Debanjan Mitra (PhD, New York University; PGDM, Indian Institute of Management; BTech, Indian Institute of Technology) is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business Administration. His research focuses on (1) the long-term effects of quality and innovation and how it differs across organizations and markets and (2) the appropriateness of different types of marketing metrics and how it differs across management objectives and market environments. His research has been published in Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, and Management Science. It has been recognized with the Marketing Science Institute’s Buzzell Award and as has been a finalist for the INFORMS’ Little Award and the Bass Award.

Peter N. Golder (PhD, University of Southern California; BS, University of Pennsylvania) is Associate Professor of Marketing and George and Edythe Heyman Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Stern School of Business. His research focuses on long-term leadership, market pioneering, and innovation. It has been recognized with several awards, including the Marketing Science Institute’s Buzzell Award (twice), Journal of Marketing Research’s O’Dell Award, INFORMS’ Bass Award, and the American Marketing Association’s Berry Book Prize. Some of the research on this project was conducted while Peter was a visiting professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management.

Journal of Marketing, Volume 72, Number 5, September 2008
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