RISIS Reasearch Seminar How universities react to funding policies: The effects at performance level.

This article investigates how European universities (EU27+UK) respond to different types of incentives, namely, funding derived from: a) core government allocation, b) external sources (i.e., third-party funding), and c) students’ tuition fees. The general research question we address is: how does universities’ performance respond and adjust to different funding government policies and universities’ strategies?

We perform an exploratory analysis based on two methodological pillars: 1) the use of the RISIS-ETER database, providing a register of European Higher Education Institutions and containing basic statistical information on them, including descriptors on geographical location, students and graduates, personnel, finances, and research activities; 2) the responsiveness-score econometric model, aimed at testing separately the response of each university toward core funding, third-party funding, and tuition fees.

Specifically, we aim at investigating specific research issues, in particular: a) the universities’ positioning in terms of the capacity to respond to specific policy measures; b) the identification of the main policy factors that universities’ performance; c) the response heterogeneity to different funding inputs; d) the study of the phenomenon of convergence (divergence) taking place in universities’ performance.