'Another Roof, Another Proof': How Mobility Explains Individual Productivity in Science
38 Pages Posted: 28 Aug 2017
Date Written: August 24, 2017
Abstract
The mobility of highly skilled employees is seen as a critical way for organizations to transfer knowledge and to improve organizational performance. Yet, the relationship between mobility and individual performance is still largely a theoretical and empirical puzzle. Building both on human capital mobility research and economics of science literature, and exploiting a unique dataset of 348 academics working in biology department in the United Kingdom, we show that mobility has a positive effect on individual productivity. We also find that this positive effect is reinforced when academics move towards better-endowed institutions. We complement our econometrical analysis with more qualitative evidence from a survey.
Keywords: mobility, academic researchers, scientific productivity, organizational resources, Arellano-Bond
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