Policy Seminars -- Spring 2008
| Speaker: Pierre Azoulay -- Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Topic: Superstar Extinction |
| Date/Place/Time: May 23, 2008 / UCLA Anderson School -- Entrepreneurs Hall C303 / 1:30PM to 3PM. |
| Abstract: We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 137 academic “superstars” in the life sciences onto their coauthors’ research productivity. These researchers died while still being actively engaged in science, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators’ coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that coauthors suffer a lasting 8 to 18% decline in their quality-adjusted publication output. These findings are surprisingly homogenous across a wide range of coauthor and coauthor/superstar dyad characteristics. Together, they suggest that part of the scientific field embodied in the “invisible college” of coauthors working in that area dies along with the star -- that the extinction of a star represents a genuine and irreplaceable loss of human capital. |
| Links to papers: Click here for paper |