Questions
SESIL asks what policies and institutions are most conducive to discovery. How should science funding be designed so that it incentivizes creativity and allows risk-taking? A funder can pay for a specific project, support a scientist over a long horizon, or give a university money to allocate as it sees fit. Most academic research in the United States is funded by federal agencies, chiefly the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, through project grants. A growing literature suggests that the design of grants matters: Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators, funded as people over longer horizons and with more tolerance for early failure, produce high-impact articles at a higher rate than comparable scientists funded by the NIH. But the range of designs in modern data is narrow.
The inaugural project
Funders of Science: Grant Making before World War II
The project uses historical variation in how grants were made to learn about alternative forms of funding. Before World War II, private philanthropies, chiefly the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, funded much of the research in American universities, and between them they used most of the designs debated today. Along with more familiar short-term grants to investigators, these funding regimes included block grants, fluid grants and large one-time capital investments.
The Carnegie Institution of Washington began in 1902 with many small grants to individual investigators and, from 1906, moved its support into its own research departments. The Rockefeller philanthropies moved in the opposite direction. The General Education Board made institutional grants to universities from 1923 to 1931, and the Rockefeller Foundation, after a transition in which it gave universities “fluid” research funds to allocate among their own researchers, made grants to individual projects from 1933.
The lab reconstructs who received these grants, when and for how much, and links them to the later publications and careers of the scientists and departments involved.