Measuring and exploring the geographic mobility of American professors from graduating institutions: Differences across disciplines, academic ranks, and genders

•This paper proposes two novel measures to study the geographic mobility of faculty members in the United States.•Explores a faculty hiring network dataset including more than 15,000 faculty members in three disparate disciplines.•American faculty exhibits high geographic mobility in terms of relocation distance and cross-MSA moves from their graduating institutions.•Assistant professors show the highest mobility while full professors show lowest mobility from their graduating institutions.•While there is little distance difference between male and female faculty members overall, female faculty members are less likely to move between MSAs or regions.