Government Funding and the Direction of Academic Energy Research

Does government funding influence the choice of research topics? Novel grant-making modalities such as the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program aim to encourage scientists to take on difficult-to-solve, wicked societal problems such as clean energy. Yet little causal evidence exists linking funding and research direction, with most existing studies focusing on health sciences. We provide new evidence on the effect of funding on clean energy research, addressing two questions: (1) Do scientists change the focus of their research in response to targeted government funding opportunities? (2) If so, what types of calls for funding best attract new researchers? Using data on grants from the Department of Energy and National Science Foundation, we combine text and regression analyses to compare the publication trajectories of funded scientists to a set of matched controls. After funding, the research of funded scientists becomes more similar to the grant topic than that of the matched controls. The effect is largest for ARPA-E, which explicitly aims to attract new scientists to clean energy research, suggesting that agency efforts to attract new researchers to a topic area can succeed. General calls for funding such as offered by traditional NSF directorates generate less movement.