Political Hegemony, Imitation Isomorphism, and Project Familiarity: Instrumental Variables to Understand Funding Impact on Scholar Performance

2024-11-07

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study addresses the endogeneity challenge in evaluating how research funding affects scholar performance. Leveraging a novel, fine-grained dataset comprising 9,501 U.S. social science grants and their matched scholarly outputs, it constructs the first grant–output linkage dataset of its kind. To identify causal effects, the paper innovatively proposes three exogenous instrumental variables—political hegemony, mimetic isomorphism, and project familiarity—and employs two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation alongside multiple robustness checks. Results show that funding significantly increases publication quantity and citation impact; while it does not boost publications in high-CiteScore journals, it markedly reduces submissions to low-prestige outlets, thereby elevating scholars’ overall academic performance baseline. The study contributes both a new methodological framework for science policy evaluation and an empirical benchmark grounded in rigorous causal identification.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Machine Learning: Causal Learning
• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Mechanism Design

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining

Abstract

This paper contributes a new idea for exploring research funding effects on scholar performance. By collecting details of 9,501 research grants received by principal investigators from universities in the U.S. social sciences from 2000 to 2019 and data on their publications and citations in the Microsoft Academic Graph and Web of Science bibliographic collections, we build a novel dataset of grants and article counts, citations, and journal CiteScore. Based on this dataset, we first introduce three instrumental variables (IVs) suitable for isolating endogeneity issues in the study of competing grant effects, namely scholars political hegemony in academia, imitation isomorphic behavior among scholars, and project familiarity. Then, this study explains the research funding effects by combining the three IVs with a two-stage least square (2SLS) model. Also, we provide validity and robustness tests of these three IVs and research funding effects. We find that our IVs serve the function of exogenizing and isolating endogeneity in capturing the research funding effect. Empirical findings show that receiving research funding increases a scholars research output and impact. While research funding doesn't significantly increase high CiteScore publications, it reduces submissions to low-prestige journals, reshaping journal selection strategies and raising the floor of academic performance.

Problem

• Explores research funding effects on scholar performance
• Introduces instrumental variables to address endogeneity issues
• Analyzes funding impact on research output and journal selection

Innovation

• Uses instrumental variables to isolate endogeneity
• Combines IVs with 2SLS model for funding effects
• Analyzes grant impact on scholar performance