No 2019/14 Does Mobility across Universities Raise Scientific Productivity?

Abstract

Using a highly comprehensive new dataset on Swedish researchers, we investigate the effects of interuniversity mobility on researcher productivity. Our study suggests substantial gains from mobility on scientific output. We find that mobility induces a long-lasting increase in a researcher’s publications by 29% and citations by 50%. Moreover, we analyze the factors that are likely to have an impact on the overall effect of mobility: the interaction of mobility and promotion, the importance of the status of the destination university, as well as the role of the specific disciplinary field of mobile researchers. The empirical analysis addresses selection using inverse probability treatment censoring weights.