The impact of ex-ante subsidies to researchers on researcher's productivity: Evidence from a developing country

In this paper we perform a short-run (two years after the programme) impact evaluation of a programme that provides ex-ante subsidies to researchers in Paraguay. The analysis of the effects of this type of subsidies, that are prevalent in Latin America, has received little attention in the literature. Thanks to the availability of data coming from electronic CVs of applicants we are able to analyse the impact of the programme in dimensions of researchers' productivity that have been mostly overlooked previously, such as technical production, own education, the training of other researchers and other dimensions of the bibliographic production different to published articles. We also provide estimations of the impact on quantity and quality of publications based on more traditional sources of data. We find some positive impacts of the programme. However, some of the results are not robust to alternative methods of estimation.