Should I stay or should I go? The role of national geographic mobility, gender, age, institutional research profiles, and labor market on the career performance of the scientific workforce in Colombia

Academic mobility is a central concern in science policy, yet research has focused largely on international mobility or migration, leaving national mobility in middle-income countries underexplored. This study examines how national geographic mobility between cities and municipalities is associated with the career performance of Colombian researchers classified under the national evaluation system of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation (MinCiencias). Drawing on open administrative data from six assessment calls conducted between 2013 and 2021, the analysis covers 40,485 researcher-call observations. An ordinal logistic regression model estimates the association between researcher rank (Junior, Associate, Senior) and a set of lagged individual, institutional, and contextual covariates, including a binary indicator of inter-city relocation. Because the proportional odds assumption is rejected, an unrestricted specification is adopted to capture heterogeneous effects across rank thresholds. Inter-city mobility is uncommon, affecting 2.7% of observations, and is concentrated among early-career researchers. Mobility is not associated with accelerated promotion; instead, it correlates with rank instability, particularly for Junior and Associate researchers. Institutional concentration of academic capital emerges as a strong correlate of rank progression, consistent with cumulative advantage. However, mobility is associated with rank instability mainly when researchers relocate to smaller cities, whereas moves toward larger urban centers show no comparable penalty.