Séminaire d’économie de Bordeaux

Gabriele Pellegrino

(University of Milan)

“Mass Dismissal and the Limits of Organizational Resilience in Science: Evidence from the Turkish Failed Coup”

What happens when an organisation suddenly loses a substantial share of its skilled workforce? We study the 2016 purge of Turkish academia, during which more than 6,000 academics were dismissed by government decree. Combining official dismissal records with the universe of Scopus publications by Turkish universities, we construct department- and author-level panels covering the period 2011–2022. We show that departments exposed to larger dismissals experienced persistent declines in scientific output. These losses are transmitted primarily through collaboration networks rather than organisational membership: researchers who collaborated with dismissed academics experience lasting reductions in productivity, whereas colleagues without prior collaboration links are largely unaffected. Although departments partially adjust through organisational reallocation and the entry of new researchers, these mechanisms do not fully offset the initial shock. Our findings highlight the importance of collaboration networks in shaping organisational resilience and suggest that the loss of embedded human capital can generate persistent declines in scientific production.

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