The newly-elected Parliament has begun its first session, and the first couple of days have been taken up with the usual rituals: the election of the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, the Speech from the Throne, and the use of Any Number of Capitalised Words to Describe it All. In short, Democracy at Work.

But economists know that this is all window-dressing. The really important decisions have already been made, in secret, by an unelected group of people whose names are not released to the public.

Until now, that is.

I am, of course, referring to Adjudication Committee 7 (Economics) of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s 2006 competition for Standard Research Grants. Committee 7’s job is to decide which research proposals in economics get funded, and for the second year in a row, I was there.

It was an interesting experience. The deliberations went very smoothly and quickly: significant disagreements were very rare. What made it relatively easy for us is that economics has widely accepted standards for evaluating research output, and there’s broad agreement about journal rankings. It would often be the case that a reviewer would say "Personally, I think this proposal is a waste of time, but since the applicant has been successful at getting this sort of work published in the top journals, I’m giving it a high mark."

I’m given to understand that in some of the other committees, in fields where there isn’t an accepted hierarchy of journal quality, it’s not unusual to see committee members submit wildy varying preliminary scores. These then have to be thrashed out by the whole committee, and if you have 100 or so files to look at, it makes for a long week. As it was, we were done after two days.

Although I’m not allowed to comment on particular files, I was – again – very impressed by the general quality of  the submissions. If we had our way, we would have been very happy to award funding to quite a number of grants that fell short of the cutoff line. But we didn’t have our way, and that’s the story I have to tell here.

If you haven’t actually participated in the adjudication process, you’d think that the procedure went as follows:

• SSHRC gives the economics committee a certain amount of money.
• The committee allocates it as it sees fit.

You’d be wrong, of course.

The first step is the calculation of the the economics envelope. First, SSHRC decides what the total envelope is for all disciplines – this is of course a political decision, and I don’t know what happens there. The next step is to allocate that money across disciplines. Offhand, I would have thought that economics’ share would be proportional to our weight in the social sciences: a function of the number of professors and/or students or some such. But instead, what SSHRC does is add up all the requests for money from all grant applications in all disciplines, and each committee’s share of the total SSHRC budget is set equal to the total requested of the committee, divided by the total requested of SSHRC.

When this was explained to us, our reaction was of course what you’d expect of a group of 10 trained economists: "So all we have to do to increase our budget is to get as many economists as possible to submit grotesquely-inflated grant applications?" To our horror, turns out that the answer really is ‘yes’.

Alright, so the way in which our envelope is calculated is screwy. But once we actually had our budget, it’s ours to allocate as we see fit, right? Well, no. For some reason that has never been clearly explained to me – and I’ve done this twice – SSHRC insists on a fixed ‘success ratio’ of 40%. No matter how much money a committee has, or how good the applications are, 40% of the applications will receive funding. No more, no less.

I know, I know. I don’t understand it, either. True, it does cut down on the number of spurious applications: the only people who will go through the trouble of writing up a grant application are those who think that they have a decent chance of being in the top 40%. The problem for economics is that the self-selection is almost certainly stronger than in other disciplines. Economists already have a good idea as to their relative ranking, and they know that if their proposal was rejected in a given year, it’s likely to be rejected in the next year as well. In fields where the acceptance probability depends at least partly on the composition of the adjudication committee, a rejected proposal can be recycled the next year with the hope that it will be read by more sympathetic evaluators.

So the only thing left for us to do was to figure out who should be above the 40% cutoff line, and to make sure that the budgets of those who were above the line didn’t exceed our envelope. It really wouldn’t have been hard to shave the budgets from those above the line in order to fund some of the projects below the line, and we would have been happy to try (as I said, there were many unsuccessful files that we would have been happy to fund), but SSHRC rules prevented us from doing so.

Lastly, there was the question of Research Time Stipends. The RTS is always a thorny issue, although it’s not obvious that it should be. From the researcher’s perspective, buying out teaching time is probably the most effective use of research grant money. And from SSHRC’s point of view, it’s hard to see why they care so much about the way the money is spent – what difference does it make to SSHRC if money is used to buy out a course or to hire a research assistant?

The answer apparently lies with university administrators. Universities don’t like the RTS, and it’s easy to see why. It’s not always easy to find an instructor to take the researcher’s place, and universities are becoming more and more sensitive to the criticism that students are being increasingly isolated from the best professors. But since they don’t want to upset the researchers who attract research funding and prestige, they let SSHRC do the dirty work of refusing course buyouts. I still don’t know what happened to the RTS this year, and apparently there’s a good chance that they’ll be eliminated entirely next year.

As committee work goes, serving on an adjudication committee isn’t a bad gig. You get a free trip to Ottawa (I like visiting Ottawa), and SSHRC does a great job of organising the actual meetings. And you get a fascinating glimpse of what Canada’s best economists will be working on over the next few years.