American Economic Journal Applied Economics· 2026Q1
Money, Time, and Grant Design
- 5citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2026year
Short summary
Grant designs that alter money-for-time trade-offs primarily affect researcher selection, not their spending plans, according to survey experiments.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Researchers show a low willingness to trade money for time when selecting grants.
- Significant heterogeneity exists in researchers' money-for-time preferences.
- Grant design changes have minor effects on researchers' planned fund utilization.
- Grant design primarily influences researcher selection, not post-award strategy.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
We conduct survey experiments to test how the design of scientific grants—the money and time awarded—can be used to manage researchers. On average, researchers are relatively unwilling to trade off money for time when choosing among grants. However, there is significant heterogeneity in researchers' preferences. Conditional on receiving a grant, different designs cause only minor changes in researchers' plans for how they would use the funding. Marginal changes in grant design are more relevant for selection effects (funders' ability to attract certain researchers) than treatment effects (funders' ability to change researchers' strategies). (JEL C83, I23, O31)
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. American Economic Journal Applied Economics, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Statistics, Probability and UncertaintyDecision Sciences