Outstanding scholar as dean: the impact of dean academic achievements on school research output

In recent years, China emerged as one of the world's largest producers of academic research papers contributing massively to national and international journals annually. This prolific output serves as evidence to the dedicated efforts of Chinese universities to foster research activities among their teaching staff. However, the role of academic leaders, particularly that of school deans, on research productivity within these institutions remains an important and unresolved question. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of the academic achievements of deans on the research output of business schools of China prestigious 985/211project universities. For this purpose, we manually collected data on the deans of business schools of 985/211 project universities from 2000 to 2018 as well as data on published research papers by each school. Empirical results show that during the tenure of an 'academic dean', the average number of papers published by business schools increased by about 10.6% annually. After being converted into standard 'Economic Research Journal' articles, this effect increased by as much as 28%. The above results are robust with several different model specifications and definitions for academic deans. Our research findings hold significant policy implications, not only for China's education system but extends to various knowledge-intensive institutions, such as hospitals, research labs, and consultancy organizations.