This paper contributes to two recently identified gaps in policy design literature. First, an approach to measuring understudied specific on-the-ground measures, namely policy settings and calibrations, is developed, with particular attention to “calibration flexibility.” Second, with this better understanding of policy design, an emerging policy design causal mechanism perspective can be further elaborated upon. On-the-ground measures of the same policy instrument—Research of Excellence Centers programs are compared across six different countries. Introduced in many OECD countries in the 1990s, Centers of Excellence were implemented with the goal of reversing the trend of “brain drain” and retaining highly mobile scholars. A theory-building process tracing approach is adopted in order to identify first- and second-order mechanisms related to pursuit of the broad policy goals of retaining and attracting scientific talent along with improving research capacity.

本文弥补了政策设计文献中最近发现的两个空白。首先，开发了一种衡量未充分研究的具体实地措施的方法，即政策设置和校准，特别关注“校准灵活性”。其次，随着对政策设计的更好理解，可以进一步阐述新兴的政策设计因果机制视角。对同一政策工具——卓越研究中心项目的实地测量在六个不同国家进行了比较。 20 世纪 90 年代，许多经合组织国家引入了卓越中心，其目标是扭转“人才流失”趋势并留住流动性较高的学者。采用理论构建过程追踪方法，以确定与追求保留和吸引科学人才以及提高研究能力的广泛政策目标相关的一阶和二阶机制。