Political hegemony, imitation isomorphism, and project familiarity: Instrumental variables to understand funding impact on scholar performance

This paper contributes a new idea for exploring research funding effects on scholar performance. By collecting details of 9,501 research grants received by principal investigators from universities in US social sciences from 2000 to 2019 and data on their publications and citations in the Microsoft Academic Graph and Web of Science bibliographic collections, we build a novel data set of grants and article counts, citations, and journal CiteScore. Based on this data set, we first introduce three instrumental variables (IVs) suitable for isolating endogeneity issues in the study of competing grant effects, namely scholars’ political hegemony in academia, imitation isomorphic behavior among scholars, and project familiarity. This study then explains the research funding effects by combining the three IVs with a two-stage least squares (2SLS) model. Also, we provide validity and robustness tests of these three IVs and research funding effects. We find that our IVs serve the function of exogenizing and isolating endogeneity in capturing the research funding effect. Empirical findings show that receiving research funding increases a scholar’s research output and impact. While research funding does not significantly increase high CiteScore publications, it reduces submissions to low-prestige journals, reshaping journal selection strategies and raising the “floor” of academic performance.