Project Details
Projekt
International mobility as strategy and outcome in the national competition for excellence
Applicants
Professor Dr. Guido Bünstorf; Dr. Anne Otto, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Economic Policy, Applied Economics
Term
since 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 447967785
The proposed project will examine how university-level competition to promote excellence is related to the internationalization of individual-level competition in the labor market and competition for third-party funding. The project is informed by the conjecture that an increasingly international competitive positioning of universities driven by the quest for excellence funding also contributes to the internationalization of its researchers’ competitive positioning. Based on this conjecture, we will use individual-level data to analyze how the success of universities in the German Exzellenzinitiative and Exzellenzstrategie affected the international mobility and the international third-party funding activities of their Ph.D.-holding researchers. Individual phases and funding lines of excellence contests will be analyzed separately, and distinctions will be made according to target countries and universities as well as between German-born and foreign-born researchers. Regarding the recruitment of researchers from abroad by German universities, our main interest is in the extent to which this represents an effect of excellence funding, versus being part of universities’ competitive strategies in excellence contests. Conceptually, our analysis will shed light on the relevance of individual-level competitive success for the dynamics of competition on the organizational level, which has received scant scholarly attention. Additional resources from the Exzellenzinitiative and Exzellenzstrategie enabled the winning universities to recruit researchers from abroad. At the same time, recruiting international researchers also allowed universities to signal their focus on excellence, especially if these researchers came from highly reputed universities or if they had high individual visibility. To assess the role of strategic international recruitment, we will investigate how reputation-related characteristics of researchers coming from abroad differed before, during and after the period during which the respective university obtained excellence funding. An international panel dataset harmonizing information about doctorate recipients in six countries that are important providers of researchers for the German system of higher education (Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, UK, USA) will be built as a data basis for the analysis. Finally, novelty and similarity measures based on natural language processing will be used to analyze how international researcher mobility affected the substance of universities’ research activities. From the overall perspective of the German higher education system, effects on the substance of research represent a crucial effect of the competition for excellence.
DFG Programme
Research Units
