The impact of funding on research collaboration: Evidence from a developing country

In this paper we evaluate the impact of research grants on the amount of collaboration among scientific researchers in Argentina. We find a positive and significant impact of funding on collaboration which is measured in terms of the number of co-authors for publications in peer-reviewed journals. Our identification strategy is based on comparing collaboration indicators for researchers with financially supported projects with those of a control group of researchers who submitted projects that were accepted in terms of quality, but not supported because of shortage of funds. We obtain consistent results by using different non-experimental techniques including difference-in-differences models combined with propensity score matching algorithms.

► We evaluate the impact of research grants on collaboration among researchers in Argentina. ► We find a positive and significant impact of funding on collaboration. ► Our identification strategy uses a control group of non-funded researchers. ► We obtain robust results with different DID models combined with propensity score matching.