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

TL;DR

This study uses instrumental variables to analyze how research funding impacts scholar performance, revealing funding boosts output and impact but influences journal selection strategies without significantly increasing high-prestige publications.

Contribution

Introduces three novel instrumental variables to isolate funding effects on scholars, combining them with a 2SLS model for robust analysis.

Findings

Funding increases research output and citations.

Funding reduces submissions to low-prestige journals.

IVs effectively isolate endogeneity in funding effects.

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.