This paper explores how social relationships between new accounting faculty members and their former dissertation chairs can influence the publishing productivity of the new faculty members in their early academic careers. The focus on social relationships offers a unique approach to studying the effectiveness doctoral education. Our findings show that strong social exchange between new faculty members and their former chairs can have a significant impact on new faculty members' scholarly productivity and provide some reasons for those effects. We also find differences in relationships between mixed and same gender pairs and examine reasons for those differences.