Do the financial sources of external funds affect research productivity? -A departmental level analysis of seven former imperial universities of Japan

This study examines research productivity of departments of seven former imperial universities of Japan. In this study, we categorize the departments into five academic fields: engineering, health science, economics, science, and agriculture. The study examines whether fundamental and external research funds positively affect the research productivity, which is measured by the number of papers accepted in international academic journals. Additionally, we investigate whether the financial sources of external research funds can affect productivity differently and if there is any variation among the five academic fields. The estimation results showed that, first, the increase of fundamental and external funds per faculty member is positively correlated with research productivity in the fields of engineering and health science. Second, considering the results of further investigation into the effects of external funding, research funding by the public sector can increase productivity in all the five academic fields. Third, the results pertaining to private research funds show that research funding provided by firms can increase productivity in engineering and health science. However, for economics, the increase in external funding from firms is negatively correlated with research productivity. This is possibly because the purpose of industry-university collaboration differs according to the academic field. Regarding economics, the output from the resulting collaboration might not result in the production of an academic paper from the department but rather lay the groundwork for effective policy making or consulting in favor of the firm on the basis of quantitative analysis. This study is the first attempt by Japanese universities to analyze research productivity at the plurality departmental level. The empirical results show that depending on the discipline, the same resources of research funding can have different impact on research productivity. Nowadays, the Japanese central government has been reforming the resource allocation systems of universities by evaluating their research performance, basing them more on the quantitative indicators such as KPI (Key Performance Indicators). However, a key result of this study implies that when the relative evaluation of universities is applied, each university fs situation must be more carefully considered, especially in terms of what kinds and shares of academic departments it has.