Superstar Extinction
Name
Azoulay-2010-Superstar Extinction.pdf
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Author(s)
Azoulay, Pierre
Wang, Jialan
Graff Zivin, Joshua S.
Date Issued
May 2010
Journal
Quarterly Journal of Economics
Publisher
MIT Press
Citation
Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang. “Superstar Extinction.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 125.2 (2010): 549-589. © 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We estimate the magnitude of spillovers generated by 112 academic “superstars”
who died prematurely 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.”
MIT Department
Sloan School of Management
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.2.549
