Show me the Money: Federal R&D Support for Academic Chemistry, 1990–2009

Joshua Rosenbloom () and Donna Ginther

Research Policy, 2017, vol. 46, issue 8, 1454-1464

Abstract: We examine the distribution of Federal support for chemistry Research and Development (R&D) performed at U.S. universities from 1990 to 2009. Federal R&D funding is an essential source of funds for investigator-driven research at the nation’s universities. Previous studies have documented that aggregated federal R&D funding has become more dispersed over time and attributed this to political pressure to spread resources more evenly. There have, however, been few studies of the allocation of funds within narrowly defined scientific disciplines. By narrowing the focus and exploiting the panel nature of our data we are better able to analyze the correlates of funding variation, yielding a number of new insights not apparent in studies using more aggregated data. First, we find that R&D expenditures at the discipline level are considerably more volatile than aggregate funding. Second, we show a strong positive association between several measures of institutional research capacity and future funding. In particular, we find a positive association between the employment of postdoctoral researchers and higher future research funding.

Keywords: Chemistry; Research & Development; University; Research funding; Postdoctoral researchers; Innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 O3 O32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733317301117
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Show me the Money: Federal R&D Support for Academic Chemistry, 1990–2009 (2017)
Working Paper: Show me the Money: Federal R&D Support for Academic Chemistry, 1990-2009 (2017)
Working Paper: Show me the Money: Federal R&D Support for Academic Chemistry, 1990–2009 (2016)
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:eee:respol:v:46:y:2017:i:8:p:1454-1464

DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2017.06.008

Access Statistics for this article

Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray

More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().