이 논문에서는 연구재단의 논문 데이터베이스자료를 활용하여 BK21 사업이 참여교수들의 연구 성과에 미친 영향에 대해 살펴본다. 방법론상으로는 각 학문분야별로 BK21 참여 교수들을 수혜집단으로 하고, BK21에 참여하지 않은 교수들 중 연구업적이 최상위에 속하는 교수들을 비교집단으로 하여 양 집단이 2단계 BK21 사업 전후로 연구 성과에서 보인 변화를 비교하는 이중차감(Difference-in-differences) 방법을 이용한다. 실증분석 결과 BK21 사업의 성과는 학문분야별로 큰 차이를 보이고 있었는데, 이공계를 중심으로 실험이 중요시되고 연구보조 인력이 중요한 학문분야에서는 BK21 사업이 교수 연구성과 향상에 기여한 반면 인문사회계열의 많은 학문분야에서는 BK21 사업이 연구성과 향상에 기여하지 못하거나 부정적인 영향을 미친 것으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과는 향후 대학원 교육지원 사업에서 학문분야별로 적절한 방식을 찾아가는 노력이 필요함을 시사한다. This paper examines the effect of grants to graduate students on the research productivity of professors using the individual level data set derived from the National Research Foundation of Korea. The Brain Korea 21 project, which was intended to promote the frontier research-based universities in Korea, has been a multi-year project and most of its fund has been given to the graduate students as grants. This unique feature of the project gives us an ideal opportunity to empirically examine the relationship between the grants to the students and the research productivity of professors in the different research areas. We compare the research outputs between the treatment group, which consists of participants of Brain Korea 21 project, and the comparison group, which consists of top researchers among non-participants. We applied the standard DID method which compares the increase in research outputs measured by papers per year between the two groups, before and during the project. The DID(Difference-in-difference) estimates show that the effects are quite different for the different majors. In many of the science and engineering majors, the effects are positive and significant,where as in most of the humanities and social science majors the effects are insignificant or even negative for some majors. The results suggest that the grants to graduate students can be an effective way of increasing the research productivity of present, as well as of that of future, especially in the majors that require extensive experiments and more research assistants in the research process.