Mobility and Productivity of Research Scientists

This chapter presents a framework to analyze the effects of mobility on academic performance and applies it to a sample of 171 UK academic researchers. We find no evidence that mobility per se increases academic performance but that mobility to a higher-ranked department has a positive weakly significant impact, while downward mobility reduces researchers' productivity (in terms of quantity and quality). Job mobility is always associated with a short-term decrease in performance, arguably due to adjustment costs. Intersector mobility is also associated with an initial short-term publication disadvantage, which appears to vanish soon after joining academia, making the overall performance of researchers that move to academia from industry not significantly different from that of pure academics.