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 -