Publish or Teach ? : Analysis of the Professor's Optimal Career Plan

Fouad El Ouardighi (1) , Konstantin Kogan (2) , Radu Vranceanu (1)

1 ESSEC Business School
2 Faculty of Social Sciences

This paper analyzes how faculty members dynamically allocate their efforts between improving their research and teaching skills, taking into account the organizational structures and incentives implemented by academic institutions. The model builds on the assumption that organizational structures have an impact on the nature of spillover effects between teaching and research competencies. We analyze the dynamic equilibrium under unilateral and bilateral spillovers, using the no-spillover case as a benchmark. The bilateral spillover case is the most appealing as it achieves the highest overall performance; however, the nature of the equilibrium and the career paths can be quite different depending on the parameters of the problem such as the obsolescence of competencies or the strength of the spillover effect. This finding provides interesting insights on what could be the most productive configuration of a higher education institution.

Mots clés: Teaching; Research; Competency spillovers; Effort allocation; Faculty management

Domaines: Management des Ressources Humaines

Fouad El Ouardighi, Konstantin Kogan, Radu Vranceanu. Publish or Teach ? : Analysis of the Professor's Optimal Career Plan. 2013. ⟨hal-00823514⟩