DOES LAB FUNDING MATTER FOR THE TECHNOLOGICAL APPLICATION OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH? AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF FRENCH LABS

This paper investigates how competitive grant funding in public research labs is associated with the type of knowledge produced. The empirical analysis is conducted on 349 French research labs observed between 2011 and 2015. To assess the type of knowledge produced by labs, we look at the lab publications’ distance from the technological frontier: the closer a publication to the technological frontier, the more applied its knowledge content. We measure grant funding intensity within labs as the number of national and European grants per researcher. We also identify grants in partnership with private companies. We find that a higher intensity of national grants is associated with a lower share of publications close to the technological frontier and a higher share of publications not connected to the technological frontier, while European grant intensity shows the opposite association. We also find that a company being a partner in a grant is associated with a higher share of lab publications at the technological frontier.