TY  - JOUR
AU  - Azoulay, Pierre
AU  - Zivin, Joshua S. Graff
AU  - Wang, Jialan
TI  - Superstar Extinction
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 14577
PY  - 2008
Y2  - December 2008
DO  - 10.3386/w14577
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14577
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w14577.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Pierre Azoulay
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-487
Cambridge, MA 02142
Tel: 617/258-9766
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: pazoulay@mit.edu

Joshua S. Graff Zivin
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0519
La Jolla, CA 92093-0519
Tel: 858/822-6438
E-Mail: jgraffzivin@ucsd.edu

Jialan Wang
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department of Finance
340 Wohlers Hall
1206 S. Sixth Street MC-706
Champaign, IL 61820
E-Mail: jialanw@illinois.edu
AB  - We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic "superstars" who died pre- maturely and unexpectedly, thus providing an exogenous source of variation in the structure of their collaborators' coauthorship networks. Following the death of a superstar, we find that collaborators experience, on average, a lasting 5 to 8% decline in their quality-adjusted publication rates. By exploring interactions of the treatment effect with a variety of star, coauthor and star/coauthor dyad characteristics, we seek to adjudicate between plausible mechanisms that might explain this finding. Taken together, our results suggest that spillovers are circumscribed in idea space, but less so in physical or social space. In particular, superstar extinction reveals the boundaries of the scientific field to which the star contributes -- the "invisible college."
ER  -