Corrigendum to “Higher Education Policy: Why hope for Quality when rewarding Quantity?” [Research Policy Volume 49, Issue 8(2020) /104083]

The authors regret to have reported in the Section 5.2 Empirical results and discussion, comments that are incorrect because the calculations were inaccurate due to information updates. The significance of the results is not undermined yet, we explained the coefficients of a wrong table. Therefore, we kindly ask for a corrigendum of our article by substituting the paragraphs at page 8 with the following ones: “which represents a 5% increase on average. When considering the difference within countries, the effect of the policy intervention grew to 0.404 (i.e. 0.078+0.326) in Germany, where both Excellence and non-Excellence Universities increased by nearly 24%. By taking a step for-ward, the effect of the EI on the German Excellence Universities was 0.950 (the sum of the above-mentioned effects and the coefficient of the triple interaction 0.546). After 2006, German Excellence universities improved their publications per professor by more than 54% compared to the publications per professors in Germany and Italy before 2006). Similarly, the EI augmented the citations per publication by 2.926, which represents an 14% increase on average (citations per publication for both German and Italian universities were 21.07). By analysing the effect of the EI on German Excellence Universities and their Italian equivalents, the effect of the policy intervention grew to 4.813 (i.e. 2.926+1.887). This corresponds to an increase of nearly 23%. Considering the differences within countries, the effect of the policy intervention in Germany was equal to 1.82 (i.e 2.926 -1.106), which corresponds to a 8% increase in citations per publication. Taking a step forward, the effect of the EI on the German Excellence Universities was -1.616 (calculated as 2.926+1.887-1.106-5.323). After 2006, German Excellence Universities received fewer citations per publication, falling by almost 7%. However, these results do not confirm a failure of the Excellence-Initiative in general and on the long run. The results just show that citations of the treated universities are declining comparing their expected incline before the treatment period, reflecting their effort in winning the contest. The short run effect also reflects adjustments after the treatment like hiring new scientists with lower experience and skills in academic writing, and also time-consuming effects like administrational efforts and reporting”. The authors would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.