Does grant funding foster research impact? Evidence from France

Policymakers are interested in assessing the effectiveness of the competitive grant funding model in producing impactful research. In the French context, we compare the impact of scientific articles supported by competitive grants with the impact of articles not supported by grants using a probabilistic matching procedure. We rely on publication acknowledgments to retrieve funding information and on citation data to assess the articles' impact. We find that articles supported by competitive grants receive more citations than articles not supported by grants in the long run, while the difference is not significant in the short run. We find heterogeneity across fields.