Money, Time, and Grant Design

TL;DR

This study investigates how research grant design influences researcher behavior, finding limited effects on strategy but significant implications for researcher selection and funding allocation.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that grant design mainly affects researcher selection rather than their strategic behavior, highlighting the importance of funding structure in research policy.

Findings

Longer grants increase risk-taking among tenured professors.

Both longer and larger grants reduce focus on speed in research.

Researchers prioritize funding amount over grant duration.

Abstract

The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First, we offer participants a hypothetical grant with randomized attributes and ask how the grant would influence their research strategy. Longer grants increase researchers' willingness to take risks, but only among tenured professors, which suggests that job security and grant duration are complements. Both longer and larger grants reduce researchers' focus on speed, which suggests a significant amount of racing in science is in pursuit of resources. But along these and other strategic dimensions, the effect of grant design is small. Second, we identify researchers' indifference between the two grant design parameters and find they are very unwilling to trade off the amount of funding a grant provides in order to extend the duration of the grant $\unicode{x2014}$ money is much more valuable than time. Heterogeneity in this preference can be explained with a straightforward model of researchers' utility. Overall, our results suggest that the design of research grants is more relevant to selection effects on the composition of researchers pursuing funding, as opposed to having large treatment effects on the strategies of researchers that receive funding.