Can money buy scientific leadership? The impact of excellence programs on German and French universities

Abstract

German and French governments have had , quasi simultaneously, this ambitious goal to push forward national champions on the global higher education and research market via, as they called it, “excellence programs”. We develop a difference-in-difference approach to identify the impact of such non standard research policy on selected universities. Our identification strategy builds upon matching those entities to European universities and upon controlling for a number of potential confounding factors via regression adjustment. We find that excellence programs have an overall positive effect on scientific outcomes that we precisely estimate. Interestingly, impact does not concentrate on top cited papers but is larger on the internationalization of research and on collaborations with industry. Additional evidence from event studies supports the idea that excellence policy essentially helped treated universities maintaining their scientific competitive edge.