Q2. What are the future works in this paper?
Given the importance of technological innovation for economic growth and the considerable public resources devoted to R & D, further research is clearly warranted. In future work, the authors plan to explore the impact of NIH funding on patents, which may be a more useful measure of societal value.
Q3. What makes a sharp RD design infeasible?
While the existence of out-of-order funding, rejected awards, and reapplication makesa sharp RD design infeasible, it is still possible to leverage the nonlinear relationship between normalized priority score and the probability of eventual grant receipt to identify the causal impact of research funding.
Q4. Why does the NIH normalize the scores of research grant applications?
3Because funding decisions are made within institutes (in contrast to research grantproposals, which are evaluated by review groups examining applications from different institutes), the NIH normalizes scores within review groups.
Q5. How many sources of funding did the sample list?
On average, the sampled articles listed 2.45 sources of funding, with about 30 percent of articles listing at least three different sources of funding.
Q6. How much money does the NIH and the NSF allocate to basic and applied research?
In the United States, for example, the National Insittutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) allocate over $30 billion annually for basic and applied research in the sciences.
Q7. How many applications did the authors drop from institute-years in which grants did not appear to be?
The authors also drop 5,089 R01 applications from institute-years in which grants did not appear to be allocated strictly on the basis of the observed priority score cutoff.
Q8. What is the effect of a postdoctoral fellowship on research productivity?
Postdoctoral fellowships have a significantly greater impact on researchers in the social sciences than those in either the biological or physical sciences in terms of publications and citations.
Q9. What is the effect of the restriction on the consistency of their estimates?
Since name frequency is unlikely to be correlated with whether an individual is just above or below the funding cutoff (conditional on flexible controls for her priority score), this restriction will not influence the consistency of their estimates.
Q10. What are the ways that unsuccessful researchers might obtain funding to continue their research?
There are several ways in which unsuccessful researchers might obtain funding to continue their research: (1) they might obtain funding from another source, such as the NSF, a private foundation or their home institution; (2) they might collaborate with another researcher who was successful at obtaining NIH funding; or (3) they might collaborate with another researcher who was successful at obtaining non-NIH funding.
Q11. What is the second approach to estimating the impact of grants?
Their second approach relies upon the fact that NIH funding is awarded on the basis ofobservable priority scores, and that there is a highly nonlinear relationship between this score and the probability of funding.
Q12. Why does the LATE compare the productivity of applicants who received a grant to that of applicants?
Because of this, the local average treatment effect (LATE) implicitly compares the productivity of applicants who received a grant because of a low application score to that of applicants who were rejected due to a higher score (controlling for a smooth function of the normalized application score).
Q13. What is the reason why a researcher is less inclined to apply for a grant?
One possibility is that NIH funding could displace funding from other public agencies or private entities, either because the researcher is less inclined to apply for such funding if she has already received an NIH award or because other funding agencies correctly perceive the marginal utility of an additional dollar to a funded researcher isless valuable than an additional dollar to an unfunded researcher.