The effect of being awardees for academic careers. ERC and FIRB recipients’ outcomes compared to ordinary academics – performances and promotions

Giulio Marini and Viviana Meschitti
Additional contact information
Giulio Marini: Social Research Institute IoE UCL, UK
Viviana Meschitti: Huddersfield Business School, University of Huddersfield, UK

No 21-08, DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London

Abstract: Some individual funding schemes aim at recognize excellence of early and/or mid-career researchers in order to allow them boost their potential. Some schemes are munificent endowments, assuring autonomy and security. This is the case of one of the European flagship schemes – the European Research Council (ERC). In Italy, a very similar scheme called FIRB has a similar rationale. Both schemes are supposed to make excellence “fly higher”. The paper checks whether such ERC and FIRB recipients are thereafter more productive in terms of quality and influence testing against a control group of Italian academics of similar age, rank and discipline who did not win such individual grants. Results show that ERC recipients ameliorate research performance more than FIRB recipients did, although differences with control group don’t show always a particular additional effect in research outputs when comparing with pre-awarding performances (difference-in-difference tests). On the other hand, we find a strong Matthew effect in promotions, being the credential of having recipient of an ERC or a FIRB per se the strongest predictor of promotion, other achievements being equal. Policy recommendations speculate whether an egalitarian non-stratified higher education system like the Italian one is ideal home for these schemes, and whether the Italian system can afford a national scheme overlapping international ones, considering long-lasting shortage of financial resources and the egalitarian structure of its system.

Keywords: Policy effect; Grants recipients; European Research Council; FIRB; Early and mid-career researchers; Research performance; academic career; promotions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 I23 M52 O32 O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-sog
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.ioe.ac.uk/REPEc/pdf/qsswp2108.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:qss:dqsswp:2108

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in DoQSS Working Papers from Quantitative Social Science - UCL Social Research Institute, University College London Quantitative Social Science, Social Research Institute, 55-59 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0NU. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Neus Bover Fonts ().