Estimating Career Benefits from Online Community Leadership: Evidence from Stack Exchange Moderators

Jens Forderer () and Gordon Burtch ()
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Jens Forderer: TUM School of Management, Campus Heilbronn, Technical University of Munich, 74076 Heilbronn, Germany
Gordon Burtch: Questrom School of Business, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215

Management Science, 2025, vol. 71, issue 3, 2443-2466

Abstract: Many IT professionals seek to improve their job prospects by engaging as leaders of online communities, for example, by serving as a moderator or admin. We investigate whether such community leadership leads to (causal) improvements in individuals’ careers. We assemble a data set, including job histories of IT professionals who have sought election as moderators (mods) in Stack Exchange question-and-answer communities, between 2010 and 2020. We estimate the career benefits of moderatorship under two complementary identification strategies: difference-in-differences (DID) and regression discontinuity (RD). We observe qualitatively consistent results under each design, finding that election to a moderator role has a significant, causal, positive effect on job mobility. We estimate that moderatorship increases the probability of a job change by between 4.7 and 12.3 percentage points over the two years following the election. We also report a series of secondary analyses that speak to associated salary increases and show evidence consistent with the notion that social capital and signaling play a role. Our findings help us understand the benefits of online community leadership, and they extend our understanding of the motivations for online community engagement.

Keywords: online community leadership; career benefits; regression discontinuity; difference-in-differences; social capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:71:y:2025:i:3:p:2443-2466

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