Productivity and financial support in academic bioscience

Despite widespread awareness that scientific record and grant funding reinforce one another, empirical models of scientific production normally consider laboratory inputs to be exogenous. The present article employs a cross-section of academic bioscientists to examine the mutual relationship between research output and financial support. Information's nonrival character is such that scientific output and funding success cannot be expressed in strictly supply-and-demand terms. We find the typical bioscience laboratory to operate in a range of decreasing returns to scale and to over-invest in laboratory equipment and materials. Publication and funding success strongly reinforce one another, explaining the right-skewed success distributions often observed in science.