The Effect of PhD Funding on Postdegree Research Career and Publication Productivity
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/obes.12232 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
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©2018 The Department of Economics, University of Oxford and JohnWiley & Sons Ltd.
OXFORD BULLETIN OF ECONOMICSAND STATISTICS, 80, 5 (2018) 0305–9049
doi: 10.1111/obes.12232
The Effect of PhD Funding on Postdegree Research
Career and Publication Productivity*
Roberto Nistic `
o†,‡
†Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Naples Federico II, Via Cintia
Monte S. 80126 Angelo, Napoli, Italy (e-mail: roberto.nistico@unina.it)
‡CSEF, University of Naples Federico II, Via Cintia Monte S. 80126 Angelo, Napoli, Italy
Abstract
This paper explores the extent to whichPhD funding encourages postdeg ree research career
and leads to publications. Using noveldata on Italian PhD g raduates, I find positivemodest
effects of funding both on pursuing a research career and on publication productivitywithin
a few years after graduation. The results are robust to a battery of checks and different
model specifications. I also provide evidence that funded students invest more in research-
oriented activities and spend less time on outside (non-research) work during the PhD, thus
highlighting mechanisms that potentially account for the effect of funding.
I. Introduction
Understanding the determinants of PhD student outcomes has long been an issue of interest
among economic scholars. Most of the existing research has focused on the importance of
faculty quality and the quality of the thesis supervisor and has found that students receiving
their PhD from higher quality universitiesare more likely to succeed later in life (Waldinger,
2010).1Other papers, focusing on students in Economics only, havedocumented that scores
in first-year core examsare impor tant predictors of PhD student professional success (Athey
et al., 2007). This paper investigatesthe role of the financial support received during a PhD
to explain postdegree research performance.
The effect of financial support on student outcomes has been widely investigated, though
mainly in relation to students in schools (Angrist, Bettinger and Kremer, 2006; Angrist
JEL Classification numbers: H52, I22, I23, J24.
*I am grateful to the editor, Jonathan Temple,and two anonymous referees for constructive comments. I warmly
thank Luigi Benfratello, Daniele Checchi, Andrew Chesher, Emanuele Ciani, Claudio Deiana, Maria De Paola,
Francesco Drago, Marco Francesconi,Andrea Geraci, Francesco Giavazzi, Ludovica Giua, TullioJappelli, Tommaso
Oliviero, Maria Katia Orteca, Marco Pagano, Evi Pappa, Matthias Parey, Erik Plug, Climent Quintana-Domeque,
David Reinstein, Joao Santos Silva, Vincenzo Scoppa, Alex Solis, Alberto Tumino, Tiziana Venittelli, conference
participants at IWAEE 2014 and seminar participants at CSEF (University of Naples Federico II), University of
Essex and University of Calabria for helpful comments and discussions. I gratefully acknowledge ISTAT for the
provision of the data.
1See also Grove andWu (2007), Hilmer and Hilmer (2007) and van Ours and Ridder (2003) for studies analysing
students in Economics only.
932 Bulletin
and Lavy, 2009; Kremer, Miguel and Thornton, 2009; Fryer, 2011) and in undergraduate
programmes (Leuven, Oosterbeek and der Klaauw, 2010; De Paola, Scoppa and Nistic`o,
2012; Gunnes, Kirkebøen and Rønning, 2013).2Related studies for students in PhD pro-
grammes paid most attention to the impact of financial support on the PhD production
process, i.e. on times-to degree and completion rates (Booth and Satchell, 1995; Ehren-
berg and Mavros, 1995; Mangematin, 2000). Some have examined the impact of research
grants on researchers’ subsequent publication outcomes (Arora and Gambardella, 2005;
Jacob and Lefgren, 2011). However, little is known about how PhD funding will affect a
student’s research performance.
This paper investigates whether funding during a PhD encourages a postdegree re-
search career and to what extent it also affects publication productivity with a few years
of graduation. It also contributes to the existing research in two different perspectives.
First, it extends the empirical evidence on the effect of financial support on PhD student
outcomes – which, to date, typically focused on one particular field of study or university
– by taking advantage of a novel data set on two cohorts of recent Italian PhD graduates
in all universities and fields of study.3Second, it adds to the debate on the role of public
investment in promoting research by examininga g raduate education system that is mostly
publicly subsidized, a characteristic of the Italian system as well as those of many other
European countries.
Addressing empirically the effect of PhD funding on subsequent research outcomes
is complex. The crucial problem is controlling for the potential endogeneity due to the
non-random allocation of funding to students. Indeed, if funded students are likely those
more academically inclined, then, failure to control for this potential correlation would
bias the OLS estimates of the effect of funding. The data used in the present analysis
provide a unique opportunity to overcome this issue for two reasons. First, the ISTAT data
allow the analysis to account for a relatively accurate measure of student past academic
ability as captured by the final grade in undergraduate studies – along with a very large
set of pre-PhD student characteristics. Second, in the context of the Italian system, the
PhD grants are allocated on the basis of an entry (written) exam, and applicants’ academic
performance in undergraduate studies is a very strong predictor of their success at this
entry exam.4This could imply that the information on individual characteristics provided
by the ISTA data, including past academic ability, plausibly subsumes everything observed
by the institutions allocating the PhD grants.
In the empirical analysis I show evidence that, indeed, the OLS results appear to lead
to reasonably accurate estimates of the effect of funding once the whole set of covariates
is accounted for. In particular, I look at the effect of funding on a variety of research
outcomes after 3–5 years from graduation, both at the extensive and intensive margin.
With respect to the former, I focus on the likelihood of either entering a profession in a
research institution or having a job involving research as the main activity. Regarding the
latter, I look at the probability of being a productive researcher either in terms of scientific
2See also Cornwell, Lee and Mustard (2005), Dynarsky (2003) and Garibaldi et al. (2012).
3The data are collected by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) and refers to PhD recipients in 2004
and 2006.
4According to the ISTAT data, 72% of PhD funded students have a BA degree with maximum grade (110/110);
85% with a grade higher than 106/110.
©2018 The Department of Economics, University of Oxford and JohnWiley & Sons Ltd
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