The Impact of University Reform on Research Performance : A Case Study of the Partial Privatization of Japanese National Universities

This paper examines causal effects of university reform on research performance. Specifically, I investigate the effect of the partial privatization of Japanese national universities since 2004. This entailed university governance reform that introduced/magnified the concept of independent institutional management and intensified the degree of accountability in the operation of national universities. The reform induced a shift from large-scale public funding to university dependence on their own revenues and external research grants. For the field of medical science, the university reform decreased the research performance. However, the reform increased the research performance for the field of engineering and economics