Faculty mobility is often understood as a mechanism through which universities redistribute scientific talent and potentially improve research performance. Yet the system-level structure of mobility and its association with individual research trajectories have rarely been examined together. We link longitudinal faculty rosters from U.S. research universities to OpenAlex publication records and study 11,535 tenure-system faculty members who changed institutions between 2011 and 2020, with a comparison group of more than 200,000 non-moving faculty members. A directed network of faculty moves reveals a strongly hierarchical market: high-prestige institutions are net importers, lower-prestige institutions are net exporters, and the mobility hierarchy closely parallels the hierarchy observed in faculty hiring. However, event-study models that account for pre-move trajectories show little evidence of sustained post-move gains in publication volume, citation impact, or top-cited publication rates, including among upward moves to more prestigious institutions. The most consistent post-move change is collaborative: movers form new coauthor ties. We also observe modest increases in the share of papers with positive CD-index values. These patterns suggest that faculty mobility primarily reallocates existing research capacity within a persistent institutional hierarchy rather than systematically altering individual research trajectories.

翻译：教师流动常被视为大学重新分配科学人才并可能提升研究绩效的机制。然而，流动性在系统层面的结构及其与个体研究轨迹的关联却鲜有共时性研究。我们将美国研究型大学的纵向教员名册与OpenAlex出版记录相关联，研究了2011年至2020年间更换机构的11,535名终身制教师，并以超过20万名未流动教师作为对照组。教师流动的有向网络揭示出一个高度层级化的市场：高声誉院校为净流入方，低声誉院校为净流出方，且流动层级与教师招聘中观察到的层级高度吻合。然而，基于事件研究模型（控制流动前轨迹）的结果显示，在论文产出量、引用影响力或被引频次最高的论文学占比方面，流动后鲜有持续提升的证据——即便在向更高声誉院校流动的情形中也是如此。流动后最一致的变化体现在合作层面：流动者形成了新的合著关系。我们还观察到CD指数值为正的论文占比略有增加。这些模式表明：教师流动主要是在持续存在的院校层级内部重新配置既有研究能力，而非系统性改变个体的研究轨迹。