The Effect of Having a Research Chair on Scientists' Productivity

Having combined data on Quebec scientists’ funding and journal publication, this paper tests the effect of having a research chair on the scientists’ performance. The novelty of this paper is to use matching technique to understand whether having a research chair is a real cause for better scientific performance. This method compares two different sets of regressions, which are conducted on different data sets: the one with all records and another with records of matched scientists only. Two chair and non-chair scientists are called matched with each other when they have closest propensity score in terms of age, number of articles, and amount of funding. The result shows that research chair is a significant determinant in complete data set but it is insignificant when only matched scientists are kept in data set. In other words, in the case of two scientists with similarity in terms of three mentioned factors, having a chair cannot significantly affect the scientific performance.