Gateway to Think Tanks
来源类型 | Working Paper |
规范类型 | 报告 |
DOI | 10.3386/w30320 |
来源ID | Working Paper 30320 |
Do Funding Agencies Select and Enable Risky Research: Evidence from ERC Using Novelty as a Proxy of Risk Taking | |
Reinhilde Veugelers; Jian Wang; Paula Stephan | |
发表日期 | 2022-08-08 |
出版年 | 2022 |
语种 | 英语 |
摘要 | Concern exists that public funding of science is increasingly risk averse. Funders have addressed this concern by soliciting the submission of high-risk research to either regular or specially designed programs. Little evidence, however, has been gathered to examine the extent to which such programs and initiatives accomplish their stated goal. This paper sets out to study this using data from the European Research Council (ERC), a program within the EC, established in 2007 to support high-risk/high-gain research. We examine whether the ERC selected researchers with a track record of conducting risky research. We proxy high-risk by a measure of novelty in the publication records of applicants both before and after the application, recognizing that it is but one dimension of risk. We control and interact the risk measure with high-gain by tracking whether the applicant has one or more top 1% highly cited papers in their field. We find that applicants with a history of risky research are less likely to be selected for funding than those without such a history, especially early career applicants. This selection penalty for high-risk also holds among those applicants with a history of high-gain publications. To test whether receiving a long and generous prestigious ERC grant promotes risk taking, we employ a diff-in-diff approach. We find no evidence of a significant positive risk treatment effect for advanced grantees. Only for early career grantees do we find that recipients are more likely to engage in risky research, but only compared to applicants who are unsuccessful at the second stage. This positive treatment effect is in part due to unsuccessful applicants cutting back on risky research. We cautiously interpret this as a “lesson learned” that risk is not rewarded. |
主题 | Health, Education, and Welfare ; Education ; Development and Growth ; Innovation and R& ; D |
URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w30320 |
来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
引用统计 | |
资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/587993 |
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Reinhilde Veugelers,Jian Wang,Paula Stephan. Do Funding Agencies Select and Enable Risky Research: Evidence from ERC Using Novelty as a Proxy of Risk Taking. 2022. |
条目包含的文件 | ||||||
文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
w30320.pdf(1078KB) | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 |
除非特别说明,本系统中所有内容都受版权保护,并保留所有权利。