This paper studies government funding for scientific research. Funds must be distributed among different research institutions and allocated between basic and applied research. Informational constraints prevent less productive institutions to be given any government funding. In order to...

Periodic research evaluations are necessary to allocate funding, but they also create pressure on researchers. Between grants, short contracts and university assessments, researchers often state that evaluations leave them little time to pursue novel research agendas and publish in more...

The procurement of an innovation involves motivating a research effort to generate a new idea and then implementing that idea efficiently. If research efforts are unverifiable and implementation costs are private information, a trade-off arises between the two objectives. The optimal mechanism...