Productivity and financial support in academic bioscience

Despite widespread awareness that scientific record and grant funding reinforce one another, empirical models of scientific production normally consider laboratory inputs to be exogenous. The present article employs a cross-section of academic bioscientists to examine the mutual relationship between...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied economics 2013-07, Vol.45 (19), p.2817-2826
Main Authors: Nag, Sharmistha, Yang, Hui, Buccola, Steven, Ervin, David
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biotechnology
Cross-sectional analysis
Economic models
Empirical tests
Federal funding
Financial economics
Funding
Laboratories
Productivity
research management
science funding
science productivity
Studies
Success
Supply and demand
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Summary:Despite widespread awareness that scientific record and grant funding reinforce one another, empirical models of scientific production normally consider laboratory inputs to be exogenous. The present article employs a cross-section of academic bioscientists to examine the mutual relationship between research output and financial support. Information's nonrival character is such that scientific output and funding success cannot be expressed in strictly supply-and-demand terms. We find the typical bioscience laboratory to operate in a range of decreasing returns to scale and to over-invest in laboratory equipment and materials. Publication and funding success strongly reinforce one another, explaining the right-skewed success distributions often observed in science.
ISSN:0003-6846
1466-4283
DOI:10.1080/00036846.2012.676737