Concentration, Positional Persistence, and Institutional Mobility Across Five Major Public Research Funding Systems

Abstract

This study compares the concentration, positional persistence, institutional mobility, and performance associations observed in five major public research funding systems: NSF, NSFC, JSPS, NSERC, and NSTC. Institution-year funding records are linked to SciVal indicators, while explicitly recognising that agency funding and whole-institution bibliometric performance do not have identical coverage. RQ1 provides descriptive recipient-panel concentration diagnostics. RQ2 distinguishes system-level co-concentration from institution-level conditional associations and applies Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery-rate adjustments to prespecified families of focal tests. Positive system-level slopes predominate, but only one of 123 main 41-indicator Funding Gini tests remains significant after FDR adjustment; the 24 principal pooled institution-level fixed-effects PPML specifications, covering eight outcomes under three FSL specifications, detect no consistent statistically distinguishable funding-share association. RQ3 shows substantial persistence in accumulated top-funded positions. Annual-funding and non-overlapping-window checks indicate that persistence remains when mechanical overlap is reduced, and current top-funded status is positively associated with later performance-elite status for most estimable indicators. These findings are noncausal distributional and positional diagnostics. They do not identify governance mechanisms or describe the entirety of national public research funding.