The Incentive Mechanisms And Knowledge Production In China's Universities

The number of scientific publications and licensed patents in China has stably hold the champion throne in the world,and many universities have occupied the top positions in the world university rankings.Unfortunately,China still has to suffer the crisis and dilemma of technological blockade and containment.The lack of original,basic and high-quality research finding and production is a pivotal obstacle to achieving scientific and technological self-reliance.As a professional institute on knowledge production,universities play an irreplaceable role in building an innovation-oriented country and shaping the country's core competitiveness in a knowledge economy.Chinese universities are still characterized by extensive expansion and have not yet embarked on the path of high-quality and intensive development.Based on the practical problems of university governance,it is important and urgent to study the characteristics,origins,context and mechanisms of knowledge production in Chinese universities.The factors that affect the knowledge production of university are numerous and complex.The research framework of the existing literatures mostly focuses on local empirical analysis,that is,only pays attention to the influence of some specific factors from the university level,ignoring the decision-making mechanism of these direct executors,such as university presidents and teachers in the bureaucratic system.Some other literatures have qualitatively analyzed the problems and possible mechanisms of university governance,but lacking empirical evidence.From the research perspective of incentive mechanism,this study firstly constructs conceptual theoretical models,and examines the influence of political promotion incentive,academic position appointment incentive and intellectual property incentive on the behavioral decisionmaking of university presidents and teachers.Specifically,starting from these three incentive mechanisms,it analyzes the influence and mechanism of Chinese university governance characteristics on knowledge production and provides empirical evidence.At the university level,this paper focuses on the university president's governance strategy in the political promotion tournament,analyzes the relationship between the university president's governance efforts and their political promotion,and explains the internal logic of China's higher education development,to disclose the institutional mechanism of bad tendencies such as"thesis" at the level of university governance.At the teacher level,the paper starts with two products of knowledge production,namely paper and patent,and examines the influence of two specific university governance policies,namely,the incentive of academic position appointment and the incentive of intellectual property rights,on the quantity and quality of teachers' knowledge production.Empirical research shows that:The incentive of political promotion is helpful for the expansion of a university,while distorting the effort of its president.This research uses the balance index of the development of various departments in a university to measure the university president's governance strategies,"to make up for the shortcomings" and "to increase the strength",uses the number of patents and papers to construct scale indicators,and uses changes in university rankings to construct quality indicators.The research has found that:First,under the appointment system of Chinese university presidents as government officials,there is also a "GDP" political promotion tournament for universities with scale indicators such as papers and patents as the main content.This is the endogenous motivation and inner logic expansion of Chinese universities.Second,the president?s best strategy for political promotion is to make up for the shortcomings rather than to increase the strengths,and the best effort is to expand the university's scale rather than improve its quality.Third,the president's strategy to make up for shortcomings is to increase the probability of promotion through the channel of scale expansion.The most important policy implication is to adjust the relationship between the government and universities,reform the president's appointment system,and promote the intensive and high-quality development of universities.The pressure of academic position promotion under the quantity-based evaluation system motivates university teachers to increase the number of paper publications,but inhibits their efforts to produce highquality ones.This paper tries to examine how an individual faculty member changes his/her academic output after the adoption of the quantity-based promotion system in his/her three sequential academic positions of lecturer,associate professor,and full professor respectively,with respect to both the quantity and the quality of research publications.Through the self-built database,the quantity and quality indicators are constructed for each faculty by using information of the authors' position in the research paper and the impact factor of the journal in which the paper is published.The pressure index at each position and university level is constructed by using the eligibility information of promotion.First,for each economist the quality of academic output increases with academic positions.The study found that in the stage of associate professor,he/she faces fierce promotion pressure,while the quality of his/her academic output is not at the highest level.After he/she becomes full professor,he/she has the least promotion pressure and produces high-quality papers.Empirical evidences show that high-quality academic output mainly comes from the relaxation of the promotion pressure.Professors produce high-quality paper in the low-pressure environment.The environment with high promotion pressure shaped by the quantity-based evaluation system is an important reason of the short-term behavior of academic production in Chinese universities.It is important to relax the promotion pressure and provide a liberal academic environment for academic staff for the improvement of academic research quality in Chinese universities.For this purpose,it is necessary to introduce reforms of the quantity-based evaluation system in Chinese universities.The intellectual property right has important impacts on the knowledge production behavior of university teachers.Since 2015,the Chinese government has formulated policies to further increase the inventors'share of intellectual property.This study assesses the effect of policy implementation on the quantity and quality of university patent applications,as well as the heterogeneous responses from universities of different abilities,including both patent sales and investment in basic research.This study matches microscopic patent information data with universities and enterprises.According to the matching results,630 Chinese universities are used as the treatment group and 1098 listed manufacturing companies are used as the control group to examine the changes in the quantity and quality of patent applications in universities.The study has found that the number of university patent applications and the number of patents granted increased significantly,the number of high-quality patents increased,but the average quality decreased.At the same time,the average quality of granted patents has also dropped significantly,and the country's patent grant review and approval system does not seem to have played a valid role in inhibiting low-quality patents.Based on the comprehensive ranking and the scientific ranking of universities,this study examines the heterogeneous responses of universities with different abilities to policies,and finds that universities with high comprehensive ability have a stronger advantage in the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements,while universities with high scientific research ability do not have this advantage.Universities with high scientific research capabilities with comparative advantages in basic research tend to allocate more resources to applied research after the policy is implemented.These results provide a warning sign for the reform of science and technology policy.