Universities' access to research funds: do institutional features and strategies matter?

Competitively allocated research funds, from both public and private sources, constitute an increasing share of university revenues. The article investigates empirically, using data on the Italian university system, whether structural and strategic features of universities—such as size, age and especially the importance that they assign to their teaching and research missions—affect their success in securing research funds. The analysis shows that universities that strategically prioritize their research mission also obtain higher funds per researcher, from different sources. These results are compared with those obtained by similar studies of other European higher education systems, and some general implications of the introduction of competitive funding mechanisms for university behaviour are derived