Productivity and financial support in academic bioscience

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• biotechnology
• research management
• science funding
• science productivity

JEL Classification:

• L3
• O31
• O33
• O38
• L30
• O32

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) under IFAFS Agreement No. 2001-52100-11217. USDA assumes no responsibility for its findings.

Notes

¹ Buccola et al. (2009) employ these data to assess research basicness and excludability characteristics.

² Proportions of support in the mean scientist's funding portfolio were: federal (71%), private foundation (8%), industry (9%), state (7%) and other (5%). Other funding was grouped with federal and foundation support. For simplicity, we will often refer in this article to federal and foundation monies as ‘federal’, and industry and state monies as ‘industry’. This is particularly appropriate in the former case, as foundation funds represent only 10% of the federal-and-foundation category.