Public funding and the ascent of Chinese science: Evidence from the National Natural Science Foundation of China
研究2011年国家自然科学基金项目升级对科研产出的影响，发现更慷慨的资助增加了论文数量和质量，且对年轻学者、资金受限领域和非顶尖机构的研究者效果更显著。
We investigate the role of public funding in the rapid ascent of Chinese science by examining the impact of a major upgrade of a funding program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2011. Using research grant level data and a difference-in-differences estimator, we found that the more generous funding resulted in higher research output, measured by the number of publications, the number of citation-weighted publications, the number of journal impact factor-adjusted publications, and the maximum journal impact factor. This belies significant variation in the impact of the change in funding by researcher characteristics: 1) less-established researchers benefit more from the funding upgrade; 2) scientific fields that are more likely to be financially constrained benefited more; and 3) researchers from less-prestigious research institutions made more productive use of the additional funds. Finally, we found that the funding upgrade has led to increasing collaboration with researchers from top science-producing foreign countries for the less-prestigious institutions.