Zijing Yuan

My research focuses on strategic human capital, especially star employees, employee mobility, collaboration, and staffing decisions. I study how firms attract, integrate, and redeploy talent, and how these processes affect collaboration and performance. I use archival data and quantitative methods across settings such as professional sports, academia, and patenting. I will be on the job market in AY 2026-2027 and attend the Academy of Management Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.

JOB MARKET PAPER

Different Stars, Different Collaboration Patterns? Insights from the NBA

Stars are widely recognized as vital contributors to organizational success, yet the definition and impact of stardom remain inconsistently conceptualized in the literature. We distinguish among three dimensions of stardom (i.e., performance, visibility, and status) and focus on "mismatched stars", individuals who excel in one dimension but not the others. Using detailed dyadic collaboration data from the National Basketball Association (NBA), we explore how colleagues differently allocate collaboration efforts toward performance stars, visibility stars, and status stars. Our findings show that visibility stars and status stars receive more collaboration from colleagues compared to performance stars who are typically more productive. We term these phenomena “visibility traps” and “status traps”. Furthermore, these collaboration patterns evolve with increasing familiarity among colleagues, suggesting that colleague-specific knowledge reshapes how coworkers allocate collaborative effort over time.

PUBLICATIONS

• The Strategic Human Capital Conversion Problem (with Miguel Espinosa and Russ Coff), Forthcoming, European Management Review.

WORKING PAPERS

• Different Stars, Different Collaboration Patterns? Insights from the NBA
• Hiring Different Star Employees and Unit-Level Performance (with Thorsten Grohsjean and Pingshu Li)
• Patent Disclosure and Inventor Mobility (with Stefano Breschi, Bruno Cirillo, and Annamaria Conti)
• Internal Vs. External Hiring: Staffing Decisions and Organizational Performance (with Yezi Kang)