Abstract
This paper presents a timely analysis of participation in the 8th European Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (EU FP) Horizon 2020. Our dataset comprises the entire population of research organizations in Norway, enabling us to distinguish between non-applicants, non-successful applicants, and successful participants. We find it important to distinguish two stages of the participation process: the self-selection stage in which organizations decide whether they wish to apply for EU funding, and the second stage in which the European Commission selects the best applications for funding. Our econometric results indicate that the propensity to apply is enhanced by prior participation in EU FPs and the existence of complementary national funding schemes; further, that the probability of succeeding is strengthened by prior participation as well as the scientific reputation of the applicant organization.
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Notes
Hospitals without university function are formally a part of the PRO sector, whereas those with university instruction functions fall within the HEI sector (Research Council of Norway 2015).
The data retrieved were entered into ECORDA in July 2015, but it covers project applications only until February 2015. The EU Commission has decided that there must be a time-lag of approx. 5 months from the application deadline until data are published.
In additional exercises not reported in this paper, we used two corresponding variables indicating whether an organization has served as coordinator of an FP6 or FP7 project, in order to take into account the role of network centrality in previous participation. These results confirm the positive role of network centrality for participation in EU research. We have also sought to use “coordinated projects” (rather than mere participation) as the dependent variable in the regressions. However, our sample includes only a limited number of coordinated projects, so these additional exercises should be interpreted with caution.
For this variable, we have positive citation data for only 89 institutions, because of the set threshold of minimum 500 publications for inclusion in this database. We set “reputation” for missing organizations at 0, as done by Lepori et al. (2015).
Lepori et al. (2015) used external funding as an indicator for third-party funds, including external funding from the EU, Research Councils and private companies. We have chosen to treat these variables separately and divide them by total funding to get a measure of the amount of funding by total revenue.
Some of our explanatory variables have skewed distribution, and in particular those measuring R&D capabilities, financial conditions, and size. We log transformed these variables before entering the regression model.
In previous research, due the absence of data enabling to distinguish between non-applicants and unsuccessful applicants, both of these groups were combined together and typically given a value of 0 in the regressions, whereas successful applicants were given a positive integer value (1 if the dependent variable was defined as a dummy, and values equal or greater than 1 if the variable was measured as a count). However, combining together non-applicants and unsuccessful applicants in the same regression tends to underestimate the estimated slopes of interest (the larger the mean of a given explanatory variable for the group of non-applicants, the larger the bias). We overcome this problem by estimating Eq. 2 only on the sub-sample of applicants. Table 3 reports the median of our explanatory variables for four groups of observations: (1) non-applicants, (2) unsuccessful applicants, (3) applicants that have been awarded one project, (4) applicants that have been awarded more than one project. The table shows that, for the group of non-applicants, three variables (publication points, national funding, and size) have positive median. Hence, our econometric approach yields more precise estimates for these three variables in particular. Table 4 reports a comparison of means of successful applicants (at least one project funded) and unsuccessful applicants (no projects funded) for all explanatory variables, along with t-tests of mean differences. The t-tests illustrate clearly that successful applicants have on average higher values in relation to the variables measuring previous participation, reputation and national funding. Hence, justifying the sample and the hypotheses.
We have also estimated our model by following different econometric approaches. First, we have reproduced the approach used by Geuna (1998) and Lepori et al. (2015) on our dataset, i.e. estimating Eq. 2 by means of a logit (for a dummy dependent variable: funded vs. not-funded), and by means of a truncated regression (for a count-dependent variable that excludes organizations with 0 funded projects). The problem with these approaches is that, due to the relatively small size of our sample, the variability is limited and it is difficult to obtain precise results. Second, we have estimated Eqs. 1 and 2 jointly by means of a Heckman sample selection model (Heckman 1979). However, this approach requires the dependent variable in the second step to be dichotomous. Given the fairly small sample in our study, using a dummy-dependent variable greatly diminishes the data variability. Sample selection models that account for count outcomes are still under development and are not yet incorporated in standard econometric software. We tried using the sample selection model wrapper (SSM) based on generalized linear latent and mixed models (GLLAMM), developed by Miranda and Rabe-Hesketh (2006), but the procedure failed to produce the required output.
A possible reason why the size variable is not significant in the estimations in step 2 may be due to multicollinearity. The correlation coefficients in Table 2 indicate SIZE to be positively correlated with the FP6 and FP7 participation variables (although the VIF statistics for these variables are below critical threshold levels for multicollinearity). If we exclude the latter from the regressions, the size indicator becomes statistically significant. To test further the effect of size on H2020 participation, we have also carried out another exercise based on a matching approach. The results of matching results, reported at the end of this section, show indeed that size has a significant correlation to H2020 participation.
A cross-classification table between participation to FP7 and H2020 shows that persistence is important in our sample, as expected, although it does not completely predict participation patterns. In fact, 24 % of organizations that got at least one project in FP7 also got funding from H2020, whereas 25 % were not able to succeed in H2020. On the other hand, 48 % of the organizations that did not have any funded project in FP7 did not have any H2020 project either; and only 3 % of organizations managed to get a H2020 project although they did not have any FP7 project.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank two anonymous referees of this journal for valuable comments and suggestions. The authors are solely responsible for any remaining error and omission. Work on this paper was supported by the Norwegian Research Council’s Public Sector Ph.D. Program (Grant Number 246964/H20).
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Enger, S.G., Castellacci, F. Who gets Horizon 2020 research grants? Propensity to apply and probability to succeed in a two-step analysis. Scientometrics 109, 1611–1638 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2145-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2145-5