Where do I stand? Assessing researchers' beliefs about their productivity

In 2017 the Italian government established the Fund to Finance Basic Research Activities - FFABR - with the purpose of assigning a 3,0 0 0-euro research grant to the most productive applicants among eligible assistant and associate professors. We show that many low productivity researchers applied to the program while many high-productivity ones did not. Our evidence from both a simple structural model of program participation estimated on registry data, and a survey of the eligible population suggests that high-productivity researchers under-estimate their own position in the productivity distribution relative to the assignment threshold, while the opposite holds for low-productivity ones. (c) 2021 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

High-productivity researchers tend to underestimate their own position in the productivity distribution, while the opposite holds true for low-productivity researchers.