Retention of talented academic researchers: Evidence from a government intervention. (December 2015) - Courty, Pascal
Abstract: The Canada Research Chairs (CRC) Program is designed primarily to retain academic talent in Canadian universities by providing targeted grants to outstanding researchers. Once awarded a chair at her home university, a researcher's compensation increases by 6.3% on average, with a significant decline over CRC tenure. Furthermore, the chance of the researcher changing jobs does not decrease. Although universities report spending more than half of the grant on compensation, only a small portion of the grant can be accounted for as a compensation increase. This demonstrates the difficulty in designing government interventions to have an impact on academic retention.