Using Grant Competition Finalists to Estimate the Effect of Large Research Grants on Early Career Scientists: Evidence from Singapore

The impact of large scale research grant on early-career scientific research is examined by studying Singapore’s NRF Fellowship, launched in 2007. This scheme offers generous grants worth up to S$ 3 million (~ €1.8M) over 5 years and is open annually to international applications without restriction on nationality. We estimate the causal impact of large-scale grants awarded to early career scientists by using the NRF Fellowship’s highly selective award process as a source of quasi-experimental variation. Our empirical strategy relies on using the shortlisted non-awardees to form a counterfactual, allowing us to estimate the impact of the NRF Fellowship grant on the scientific output of early career scientists. Overall, our evidence suggests the NRF Fellowship’s large grant quanta are effective at increasing aggregate publication output. This is an important finding given that the ostensible purpose of such large, internationally competitive grant programs is generally to promote leading edge, high impact research not possible without generous unrestricted funding. The results suggest that the NRF selection process and the generous grant quanta certainly help the awardees with scientific successes by most definitions, having accumulated a substantial number of publications and citations.The results shed light on the public policy initiatives taken by many emerging-countries to jump-start scientific research and development through large-scale scientific funding programs. Results suggest that large-scale funding could effectively stimulate aggregate scientific output of early-career scientists.