Do funding schemes help ameliorate publications? An analysis among Italian academics who won FIRB and ERC

Some individual funding schemes aim at recognizing excellence of early and/or mid-career researchers, allowing them to boost their potential via munificent endowments, autonomy, and employment security. In Italy, this is the case of “Futuro in Ricerca” (FIRB), which is in many regards similar to the European Research Council (ERC) scheme. Both schemes are supposed to make excellence thrive, which is understood also in terms of publishing in leading journals and establishing international collaborations. The paper checks whether FIRB recipients are thereafter more performative in terms of quality of publication (ranking of target journals and international co-authorships), testing against a randomly extracted control group of Italian academics of similar age, rank and discipline. The study tests also against ERC recipients active in Italy. Results of difference-in-difference tests show that i) FIRB recipients improve their capacity to publish in highly ranked journals, similarly to what ERC recipients do; ii) these schemes do not incentivize international co-authorships; iii) FIRB is not conducive of notable changes within non-bibliometric disciplines.