Research Grants and Scientists' Inventions

Does competitive funding of public research directly generate inventions (and how)? We use longitudinal data on French researchers and professors, their applications, and grants received from the French National Research Agency (ANR) to document the relationship between public research funding and inventions by grant recipients. We first show that after controlling for various individual characteristics such as age, gender, scientific impact, and field, scientists with a ``taste for invention'' are significantly more likely to apply for grants, although their chances of being selected are lower. The overall selection effect is positive, particularly for directed programs that strongly attract these profiles. Grants have no significant overall causal impact on the propensity of recipients to generate inventions, but they do favor inventions in hard sciences, from those who have not invented before, and when a ``competitiveness cluster'' supports the project.