Federations of academic departments: performance-based funding and academic field-level expenditures at Russell group universities

The widespread adoption of performance-based funding has been a global trend in higher education policy over the past 40 years. While considerable attention has been devoted to studying the relationship between performance-based funding and institutional behavior at the university level, little research has explored the relationship between performance-based funding and institutional decision-making behavior within universities. Conceptualizing universities as federations of academic departments, I used results from the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise to explore the relationship between those results and subsequent spending patterns within Russell Group universities. The most important finding is that this relationship varies based upon both the academic field and the university's rank in the Times Higher Education World University Ranking (THE-WUR). It also has implications for policymakers around the world as it underscores that policy decisions can have differential impacts not only across universities, but also within universities.