Collaborative Research: The Effect of State Disinvestment in Higher Education on Research Quality and Returns to Scale in Science Funding

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Science policy requires a firm understanding of the impact of funding on the quantity and quality of research outputs produced by university scientists. This project will examine the impact of recent declines in state support for public universities on scientific research output. Since the Great Recession, several states cut appropriations to higher education, and nineteen states have not restored funding to 2008 levels. Yet few studies have examined the relationship between federal and non-federal research funding, and none have investigated the relationship between state funding for higher education and research output. In addition, researchers have debated whether there are diminishing returns to science funding. Diminishing returns occur when each additional dollar of funding results in fewer publications and citations. The results of this research will allow policymakers to make informed decisions about the allocation of scarce funding resources to higher education at the state and federal levels.The proposed research will examine the effect of changes in support for higher education funding to examine the returns to science funding in terms of publications and citations across science and social science disciplines. First, the project will use new data that links publications, citations and grants to individual faculty members at research universities to model the returns to scale of science funding across several disciplines. Variation across these fields will shed light on the returns to scale in science funding. Second, the project will examine whether state funding of higher education is a substitute or complement for federal research funding in the production of research output measured by publications and citations. If state funding is a complement for federal research funding, one would expect that federal research dollars would fall in states that experienced budget cuts. Third, the project will use individual level data on scientists and state budget shocks to higher education funding to examine the impact of faculty mobility on the research productivity of sending and receiving institutions.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.