Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

What is the impact of early-career scientific research funding programmes? We answer this question by studying Singapore's National Research Foundation Fellowship programme. The NRF Fellowship, launched in 2007, offers generous grants worth up to 3 million Singapore dollars over 5 years and is open to international application without restriction on nationality.  Over a decade, the NRF Fellowship attracted over a thousand highly qualified applicants and awarded nearly a hundred fellowships to date.

We estimate the causal impact of being awarded large-scale grants on early career scientists by using the NRF Fellowship’s highly selective award process as a source of quasi-experimental variation. In each grant call year, less than 20% of applicants were shortlisted, and all shortlisted applicants went through an individual interview process directly with the NRF evaluation panel and institutions in Singapore. Half from the shortlist were awarded the grant. Awarded finalists are similar and comparable to non-awarded finalists; non-awarded finalists, if anything, tend to have slightly stronger publication records at the time of application. We estimate the treatment effects of the NRF Fellowship grant program using non-awarded finalists as the control group.

We find that the NRF Fellowship award is associated with a sustained increase in aggregate publication output of about 10%, starting about two to three years post-award, and ramping up to above 20% four to five years post-award. However, the publication effect is concentrated in research that involves collaboration with the grant awardee’s Ph.D. supervisor or post-doctoral supervisor. There is no significant increase in independent publications. Nor is there evidence that publications, regardless of authorship, are more likely to be cited than publications from the control group of non-awardees.

Overall, our evidence suggests the NRF Fellowship’s large grant quanta are effective at increasing aggregate publication output. There is less evidence that independent, high impact research is effectively promoted. The results should be interpreted as the incremental effect of receiving the comparatively generous NRF Fellowship grant, instead of a more modest but likewise competitive early-career grant, since the shortlisted non-awardees were highly qualified and generally received substantial alternate funding, whether in Singapore or elsewhere.

The results shed light on the public policy initiatives taken by many emerging-country Governments to jump-start scientific research and development through large-scale scientific funding programs. The NRF Fellowship is extraordinarily generous. The US National Science Foundation’s CAREER grant scheme, also for junior scientists, awarded only 17 grants, out of more than 3,000 grants, valued in excess of 1 million U.S. dollars over five years. While scientific funding in many advanced economies has been under budgetary pressure in recent years, emerging economies are increasingly funding research and development as a means of diversifying their economies and producing sustained economic growth. Cash-rich gulf economies such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates have also established large-scale scientific funding programs. Our results suggest that while the aggregate scientific output of early-career scientists is stimulated by large-scale funding, it is too early to tell if there are long-run positive effects on independent, high quality research output.