Browsing by Author "Ball, Ashley"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Fifteen Years of a PBRFS in New Zealand: Incentives and Outcomes
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2021) Buckle, Robert A.; Creedy, John; Ball, Ashley
This paper examines the transformation of New Zealand universities following the introduction in 2003 of the Performance-Based Research Fund System (PBRFS), which assesses performance quality using a peer-review process, and allocates funds based on individual researcher performance. The analysis, based on a social accounting framework, utilises longitudinal researcher data available from the three full assessment rounds, in 2003, 2012 and 2018. The longitudinal data enable identification of entry, exit and quality transformation of researchers and their contribution to changes in university and discipline research quality. The dynamics are found to be closely related to the new incentives created by the assessment system According to the quality metric used by the PBRFS, the research quality of NZ universities increased substantially over the period, although the rate of increase was much slower during the second period, 2012 to 2018, and considerable heterogeneity across universities and disciplines was revealed. Much of the improvement can be attributed to the high exit rate of lower-quality researchers. New entrants consistently reduced the average quality of all groups, reflecting the difficulty of recruiting high-quality researchers. Changes in the discipline composition of universities made a negligible contribution compared to improvements in the quality of the stock of researchers.
Open Access
A Schumpeterian Gale: Using Longitudinal Data to Evaluate Responses to Performance-Based Research Funding Systems
(Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, 2020) Buckle, Robert A.; Creedy, John; Ball, Ashley
Performance-based research funding systems (PBRFS) have been introduced in many countries for allocating funding to research institutions. There continues to be considerable debate about the effectiveness and consequences of these systems. This paper provides a new approach to this debate. It utilises longitudinal researcher data available from the New Zealand PBRFS, which assesses institutional performance and allocates funds based on individual researcher performance. The longitudinal data enable identification of entry, exit and quality transformation of researchers and the contribution of these dynamics to changes in university and discipline research quality, in a manner similar to Schumpeter’s description of the impact of firm dynamics on productivity and economic growth, in terms of a ‘gale of creative destruction’. The approach enables a deeper understanding of individual and institutional responses to PBRFSs, the sustainability of changes, and the contributions of changes in researcher quality and discipline composition to changes in institutional performance.