Faculty mobility reallocates research capacity within persistent institutional hierarchies
For university administrators and policymakers, the study challenges the assumption that faculty mobility enhances research productivity, showing instead that it reinforces existing prestige hierarchies.
Faculty mobility primarily reallocates existing research capacity within a persistent institutional hierarchy rather than systematically improving individual research performance, as movers show little sustained gains in publication volume, citation impact, or top-cited rates despite forming new collaborations.
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.