Do Women Benefit More Than Men fromCoauthoring with a Prominent Researcher?

In this paper, we investigate whether the careers of junior researchers show a differentiated gender effect of collaboration with a prominent researcher within five years of their first publication. We use a sample from the Mexican National System of Researchers, and a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) imputation approach proposed by Borusyak et al. (2024) to compare similar junior collaborators and non-collaborators. We find positive effects on impact (total citations, citations per paper, and the h-index) and on the core number of the coauthorship network (a measure of the quality of connections),although we find no statistically significant differences between male and female researchers. Our results also suggest that the observed effects in impact and network measures may arise from a single “big hit” rather than a sustainable increase in the productivity and impact of treated researchers when considering only the focal paper. JEL codes: J16, J24, L14, O31, O32.