Faculty mobility reallocates research capacity within persistent institutional hierarchies

2026-05-07

AI Summary

This study investigates whether faculty mobility enhances individual research performance and reshapes the distribution of scholarly resources. Leveraging longitudinal rosters of over 10,000 mobile and 200,000 non-mobile faculty at U.S. research universities from 2011 to 2020, combined with publication data from OpenAlex, the authors jointly model directed mobility networks and individual research trajectories using an event study design. Findings reveal that high-prestige institutions experience net talent inflows, yet mobile faculty do not exhibit sustained increases in publication volume, citation impact, or share of top-tier papers post-move. Instead, the primary effects manifest as reconfigured collaboration networks and a modest rise in the proportion of papers with positive CD index scores, suggesting that mobility primarily reallocates existing research capacity rather than substantially boosting individual performance.

Abstract

Faculty mobility is often understood as a mechanism through which universities redistribute scientific talent and potentially improve research performance. Yet the system-level structure of mobility and its association with individual research trajectories have rarely been examined together. We link longitudinal faculty rosters from U.S. research universities to OpenAlex publication records and study 11,535 tenure-system faculty members who changed institutions between 2011 and 2020, with a comparison group of more than 200,000 non-moving faculty members. A directed network of faculty moves reveals a strongly hierarchical market: high-prestige institutions are net importers, lower-prestige institutions are net exporters, and the mobility hierarchy closely parallels the hierarchy observed in faculty hiring. However, event-study models that account for pre-move trajectories show little evidence of sustained post-move gains in publication volume, citation impact, or top-cited publication rates, including among upward moves to more prestigious institutions. The most consistent post-move change is collaborative: movers form new coauthor ties. We also observe modest increases in the share of papers with positive CD-index values. These patterns suggest that faculty mobility primarily reallocates existing research capacity within a persistent institutional hierarchy rather than systematically altering individual research trajectories.

Problem

• faculty mobility
• research trajectories
• institutional hierarchy
• scientific productivity
• academic collaboration

Innovation

• faculty mobility
• institutional hierarchy
• research performance
• coauthorship networks
• event-study design