The effect of holding a research chair on scientists' productivity

Having combined data on Quebec scientists' funding and journal publication, this paper tests the effect of holding a research chair on a scientist's performance. The novelty of this paper is to use a matching technique to understand whether holding a research chair contributes to a better scientific performance. This method compares two different sets of regressions which are conducted on different data sets: one with all observations and another with only the observations of the matched scientists. Two chair and non-chair scientists are deemed matched with each other when they have the closest propensity score in terms of gender, research field, and amount of funding. The results show that holding a research chair is a significant scientific productivity determinant in the complete data set. However, when only matched scientists are kept in data set, holding a Canada research chair has a significant positive effect on scientific performance but other types of chairs do not have a significant effect. In the other words, in the case of two similar scientists in terms of gender, research funding, and research field, only holding a Canada research chair significantly affects scientific performance.