Institutional research productivity and the connection to average student quality and overall reputation

We posit that institutions of higher education attempt to maximize their reputation, and that an institution's reputation, research output, and average student quality are determined simultaneously. Because these outputs are produced jointly, three-stage least squares is used to estimate the parameters of the model. We find that faculty research productivity is positively related to reputation but negatively related to student quality at research universities, but that reputation and student quality have little impact on research productivity at liberal arts colleges.