More experienced professors, more learning opportunities? Relationships between instructor's traits and students' academic performance in financial accounting courses of a Spanish University

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to analyse how the characteristics of professors affect students’ academic performance. To do so, we analyse a sample of recollected data from 3219 students and twelve professors from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. A linear regression model, adopting the censored least absolute deviations model, was applied. Results indicate that the quality of teaching and the publication of a greater number of articles in indexed journals in the ISI Web of Science and Econlit databases have a positive and significant influence on students’ academic performance. On the contrary, dedicating more lecture time to the subject of Financial Accounting in comparison with the total amount of lecture time, working as an adjunct professor and teaching experience negatively influence students’ academic performance.

Keywords

• academic performance
• instructor
• undergraduate
• censored least absolute deviations model