Seminar by Dr. Claudio Fasso, Lund University

"Researcher and academic careers: does mobility raises scientific productivity? "

Abstract
Using a highly comprehensive new dataset on Swedish researchers, we investigate the effects of inter-university mobility on researcher productivity using a matched sample of academics, combined with difference-in-differences analyses. In our baseline specification, we find that mobility raises publication productivity by 8 percent and citation rates by 4 percent. These effects do not hold when we employ instrumental variable (IV) techniques using increases in retirements at the scientific-field level to identify exogenous variations in mobility. Furthermore, we decompose the effect of mobility over career stages and university hierarchies. In line with earlier literature, we find that the positive effects seem to be driven by mobility to research-intensive universities. However, when we employ an IV-approach these effects also disappear. Taken together our results suggests that the gains from mobility in academia is mainly driven by assortative matching – i.e. that productive researchers self-select or are selected to high-productive departments.