Does international R&D cooperation under institutional agreements have a greater impact than those without agreements?

Abstract Funding agencies (FAs) have increasingly engaged in international cooperation agreements (ICAs) to encourage world-class research and achieve more promising outcomes in the context of increasing competition for research resources. While the benefits of International Research Collaboration are largely supported by literature, less attention was paid to the influence of ICA on scientific and technological outputs. We employed a quasi-experimental evaluation with a comparison between funding for international collaboration carried under ICA (treatment) and funding for international collaboration not carried under ICA (control). The sample was collected from the database of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) between 1990 and 2018. We have found that ICA has a positive and significant impact on the quality of scientific production measured by the number of citations, h-index, and the number of national and international papers co-authorship. However, no significant difference was found in terms of scholarly and technological outputs.