主题：The Contract for Knowledge: Public Grant Structure and Scientist Incentives公共研发资助与科学家创新激励

主讲人：中南财经政法大学财政税务学院 叶菁菁教授

主持人：财政税务学院院长 李建军教授

时间：11月24日下午13：00-14：30

地点：柳林校区格致楼918会议室

主办单位：财政税务学院 科研处

主讲人简介：

叶菁菁，中南财经政法大学教授，博士生导师。研究聚焦于财政补贴、税收征管与国家治理议题，成果发表于《管理世界》《世界经济》《经济学（季刊）》、Journal of Banking and Finance、Urban Studies、China Economic Review等国内外权威期刊。主持国家自然科学基金项目2项，作为子课题负责人参与国家社会科学基金重大项目3项。研究成果获得香樟税收学论坛、技术经济学会、财政学论坛、劳动经济学会优秀论文奖。入选湖北省人才项目、四川省人才项目、获四川省学术和技术带头人后备人选称号。完成的咨政报告获得中央领导人的肯定批示，在实践调研中形成的研究成果得到《新京报》、《新华网》等媒体广泛转载报道，形成良好社会影响。

内容提要：

A central challenge in contract theory is designing optimal incentives for agents whose effort is multi-dimensional and largely unobservable. We exploit a 2015 budgetary reform at China's National Natural Science Foundation (NSFC) that shifted from a rigid, input-based contract to a flexible one, allowing, for the first time, compensation for the scientist's own labor. Using a difference-in-differences design on a sample of multi-grantees, we find that the flexible contract “crowded in” socially desirable effort. The reform led to a simultaneous increase in the total quantity of research output and, more importantly, shifted its composition toward non-contractible margins of quality, interdisciplinary, and openness. We also find that the reform reduced unspent grant balances and provided a stronger incentive for scientists with lower opportunity costs of time. Our results suggest that the prior strict input-based contract may have crowded out unobservable cognitive effort. In contrast, a well-designed flexible compensation contract can successfully incentivize the high-risk, high-quality innovation that public R&D aims to foster.