Measuring and Exploring the Geographic Mobility of American Professors from Graduating Institutions: Differences Across Disciplines, Academic Ranks, and Genders

This paper proposes two novel measures to study the geographic mobility of faculty members from their graduating institutions in the United States: a continuous measure using geographic distance and a discrete one concerning the concept of Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). The joint application of the two novel measures to a hand-collected hiring network dataset including more than 15,000 faculty members in three disparate disciplines (business, computer science, and history) leads to interesting findings regarding geographic mobility of American professors from graduating institutions, defined by relocation distance or cross-MSA from the PhD granting institution and the hiring institution. Overall, American faculty exhibits high geographic mobility from their graduating institutions in terms of relocation distance and cross-MSA moves. History faculty members have the highest mobility while those in business show the lowest mobility. We further find that assistant professors show the highest mobility while full professors show lowest mobility. In addition, while there is little distance difference between male and female faculty members overall, female faculty members are less likely to move between MSAs or regions in the United States. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.