M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua S. Graff Zivin and

Jialan Wang. 2010. Superstar Extinction
Economics of Innovation, SS 2016
Tereza Flanderov
University of Cologne

July 13, 2016

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

O UTLINE

M OTIVATION
I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY
R ESULTS
D ISCUSSION
R EFERENCES

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION
I

Substantial empirical contribution of collaborative

scientific effort to the production of knowledge

Particular interest in the determinants of knowledge

spillovers among colleagues

Azoulay, Graff Zivin and Wang (2010) concentrate on a

sector with a large tradition of collaboration - the life
sciences

Research question: What is the magnitude of knowledge

spillovers of academic "superstars"on their colleagues?

Lack of other econometric evidence due to the scarcity of

exogenous variation

Idea: Use the unexpected death of prominent life scientist

superstars as exogenous variation to estimate the impact
on the research output of their coauthors

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION
I

Main problem with identifying the knowledge spillovers

from coauthors until now: Coauthor teams not randomly
formed, but rather the result of a matching process

Goal: Estimate if being in a team with a successful scientist

makes his colleagues more productive

Naive approach:
coop

yjt = ij + t + 1 Dij
where:
j
i
t

indexes colleagues
indexes superstars and
indexes time.

+ Xijt + jt

(1)

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

T HE ENDOGENEITY PROBLEM
coop

yjt = ij + t + 1 Dij

+ Xijt + jt

(2)

coop

Problem: Dij not assigned randomly to coauthors rather, those who team up with a superstar are
themselves more likely to produce more papers and
become more productive anyway

Positive selection problem - Dij is correlated with

unobserved research productivity anticipations which are
not captured by the individual or time fixed effects
In this regression, 1 will overestimate the effect of

coop

cooperation with a superstar scientist on research

productivity

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

D ATA
I

Data source: Association of American Medical Colleges

(AAMC) Faculty Roster - matched employee-employer
panel (230 000 medical faculty members from 1975 to 2006)

112 extinct superstars with a total of 5 267

collaborator-star pairs (10 128 pairs in sample with control
scientists )

Superstars definition: 1. highly funded, 2. highly cited,

3. top patenters, 4. National Academy of Sciences member
(selects older, more experienced scientists)

To include younger ones as well, additional criteria:

5. National Institute of Health Merit awardees, 6. Howard
Hughes medical investigators, 7. early career prize
winners
I

Subjective superstar selection?

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

E MPIRICAL MODEL

E[yjt |Xijt ] = exp(0 +1 AFTER_DEATHit +f (AGEjt )+t +ij ) (3)

I

Measure changes in the output of colleague j after the

sudden death of superstar coauthor i which occured at
time t

t controls for all time-specific shocks to research output

which are common to all scientists in the sample and ij
controls for all time-constant dyad-specific factors

f (AGEjt ) is a flexible function of the career age of scientist j

in a given year

yjt is measured as unweighted/impact factor-weighted

publication counts and NIH grants

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

DID APPROACH
I

Differences-in-differences approach with staggered

implementation and matched controls

Treatment group: Colleagues whose superstar coauthor

died in a given year
Control group:

1. Implicit control group of those colleagues whose

superstar coauthor has not died yet and those whose
superstar coauthor died in an earlier period
2. In a sample containing the matched control colleagues, the
control group also consists of scientists working with a
superstar which does not die and who are as similar as
possible to the treated scientists prior to the treatment
Matching criteria

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I DENTIFYING ASSUMPTIONS
The sudden death of a superstar scientist was
I

Unpredictable by his/her colleagues (exogenous timing of

treatment)

Only affected the colleagues in question and not those

whose superstar coauthor did not die in that year and the
control colleagues

In order for the control group to provide an appropriate

counterfactual, we also need
I

In absence of treatment, the treated and control scientists

would have exhibited the same output development

The composition of the treatment and control groups does

not change over time

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I LLUSTRATION OF THE IDENTIFICATION STRATEGY

yjt

1
t

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I SSUE : S UPERSTAR DEATH HAD A NEGATIVE IMPACT

ON THE OUTPUT TREND
yjt

t1

t2

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I SSUE : S UPERSTAR DEATH HAD A NEGATIVE IMPACT

ON THE OUTPUT TREND
yjt




1 = 1
1

t1

t2

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I SSUE : S UPERSTAR DEATH HAD A NEGATIVE IMPACT

ON THE OUTPUT TREND
yjt

t1

t2

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I SSUE : S UPERSTAR DEATH HAD A NEGATIVE IMPACT

ON THE OUTPUT TREND
yjt

1,2

2
1 = 1,1
1

t
t1
t2
P
1 = n1 n 1,n underestimates the true 1 !

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

I SSUE : L IFE - CYCLE EFFECTS

yjt

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

I SSUE : L IFE - CYCLE EFFECTS

yjt

t1

1 overestimates the true 1 if the control scientist is still in

the increasing phase of the collaboration and the treated one
not!

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

S UMMARY OF POTENTIAL IDENTIFICATION CONCERNS

1. Underestimation of the treatment effect if the death of a

superstar negatively impacts the output trend of the
colleague
I

This positive bias would then become more pronounced

with the passage of time, with more and more post-death
scientists being in the control group

2. Overestimation of the treatment effect if scientists

experiencing a death of the superstar after the peak of the
collaboration efficiency are compared mostly with
scientists still profiting strongly from the collaboration, i.e.
in the upward-sloping part of the collaboration life cycle

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

S UMMARY OF POTENTIAL IDENTIFICATION CONCERNS

3. The inclusion of an explicit control group does not solve
the problem. Moreover, the matching on the pre-trend will
necessarily depend on the career age of the treated scientist
at the time of treatment.
I

E.g. if a scientist is treated three years after the start of his

career, the control scientist will be matched based on the
pre-trend in these three years. Additionally, the matched
scientists need not necessarily be of the same career age as
the treated ones.

4. When a scientist cooperated with more than one

superstar (occurs in 10% of the sample), only the first
death is taken into account as treatment. This could lead to
an overestimation of the treatment effect.

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

S UMMARY OF POTENTIAL IDENTIFICATION CONCERNS

5. In the presence of a negative effect of superstar death on

the coauthors output trend, people who get treatment
later in the sample (i.e. with fewer post years) will appear
to suffer smaller decreases in their post-death output than
those who are observed for many more post-periods.
Therefore, the overall 1 will be underestimated.
I

This case is substantiated in the results with time-varying

coefficients

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

E STIMATION APPROACH
I

Distribution of the dependent variables highly skewed and

nonnegative - for many coauthor-year observations, it is
just zero.

QMLE procedure based on the Poisson model with fixed

effects (not discussed here)
Clustering of the standard errors around superstars (i.e.
at a slightly more aggregate level than the coauthors
themselves)

Clustering on the superstar level assumes that standard

errors may be correlated for coauthors working with this
superstar but not between them
Potentially problematic due to some coauthors working
with more than one superstar - the standard errors may be
correlated between superstars as well

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

B ASELINE RESULTS

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

I NTERPRETATION

Baseline result: The death of a superstar coauthor has a

strong negative effect of -8.2% to -8.8% on his colleagues
research output

Most of this effect (5.2%-5.5%) comes about through the

publications written with others

In a dynamic specification, this effect is found to be

monotonically decreasing over time

Other explanation than just a loss of scientific ideas for

current research projects?

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

A LTERNATIVE HYPOTHESES
I

I MPERFECT SKILL DISTRIBUTION

By their death, the superstars teams lose an important
source of knowledge
I A negative effect on publications could therefore indicate
the struggle/delay in replacing these skills
Recent or close collaborators should suffer a larger decrease
in publications than others
I

K NOWLEDGE SPILLOVERS
The knowledge from superstars spilled over to their
coauthors and increased their productivity beyond the
papers written with him
Coauthors with a large expertise overlap should experience
the highest losses since the potential to learn from the
superstar was the highest for them
I To measure proximity of coauthors in the idea space, the
keyword overlap in noncoauthored publications from t 5
to t with the star is computed
I

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

D ISENTANGLING THE MECHANISMS

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

D ISENTANGLING THE MECHANISMS

I

Authors who are the most co-located with the extinct

superstar in the knowledge space suffer the largest
decreases in research output (10.9% differential decrease in
output compared to a baseline effect of 6.5%)
I

Problem: arbitrary cutoff for the dummy "keyword

overlap"(75th percentile)
In a specification with interactions for all four quartiles the
hypothesis that the coefficients are equal to one another
cannot be rejected

Any other hypotheses about the mechanism behind the

results (gatekeeping, imperfect skill substitution etc.) are
not supported by the data

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

D ISCUSSION
I

Even given the mostly plausible identification of the causal

effect, the results presented here should be reviewed with
caution:
I

Main result based on the fact that scientists in the

top-quartile of idea space colocation suffer the largest
losses
I

They only estimate the magnitude of knowledge spillovers

for a very elite subsample of scientists, we do not know
anything about the influence of less elite scientists
Very narrow field as a focus - results probably not
generalizable to other science disciplines, or even countries

Given that the effect on the top-quartile group cannot be

statistically differentiated from the effect on other quartiles,
the conclusion about knowledge spillovers seems overly
optimistic

Outlook: Given the knowledge spillover hypothesis, can a

similar effect be found on non-coauthors?

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

R EFERENCES

Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang. 2010.

Superstar Extinction. The Quarterly Journal of Economics,
125(2): 549589.

M OTIVATION

I DENTIFICATION STRATEGY

R ESULTS

D ISCUSSION

R EFERENCES

A PPENDIX

M ATCHING PROCEDURE
The matched colleagues are chosen according to four criteria:
1. No differential output trend until the superstars death of
the treated scientist
2. Distribution of career age (=time-year of degree) at the time
of superstar death are the same in both groups
3. Time paths of output pre-treatment are similar for both
groups
4. Balanced control variables (number of coauthorships at
treatment time, time since first and last coauthorship,...)
between treatment and control groups
coarsened exact matching used to implement these
conditions Go Back