Fueling top-notch talents: can the substantial funding for distinguished young scholars of the NSFC boost the academic performance?

The fundamental source of national scientific and technological innovation lies in people. It prompts nations to provide more public funding to enable top-notch talents to conduct academic research, thereby safeguarding the nations’ status in the field of scientific and technological innovation. However, the effectiveness of Chinese government providing substantial public Funding to support top-notch talents remains to be enhanced. Employing a dataset from Distinguished Young Scholars in China covering 453 observations, this study endeavors to investigate the nexus by dividing academic performance into academic output quantity and quality, as well as comprehensive performance. In addition, this study introduces network tie and tie strength to identify the role of social network in the nexus between the substantial funding for China’s top-notch talents and their academic performance. At first, we conduct a hierarchical cluster analysis, revealing the preliminary correlation between the funding for the Distinguished Young Scholars and their academic performance. Then, we conduct empirical analysis and corroborate that the funding can exert significant influences on the quantity and comprehensive performance, whereas the coefficient of quality is less significant. Moreover, we find that both network tie and tie strength can positively moderate the effects of the funding on quantity and comprehensive performance, but cannot moderate the effects on quality. Our study contributes to the existing literature by elucidating the nexus between substantial funding for talents and academic performance from the perspective of social network and providing valuable insights into optimizing public funding for talents to enhance their academic performance.