Do researchers pay attention to publication subsidies?

The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (Tubitak) gives individual researchers subsidies for their publications. Researchers freely use these publication subsidies as pocket money. The publication subsidy given to a researcher for an article is inversely proportional to the number of authors of the article. That is, a researcher who publishes an article receives X/N Turkish Lira (TL), where X is the subsidy amount assigned to the journal in which the article is published and N is the number of authors. In this paper, we use the 250 TL rule to see whether publication subsidies affect the behavior of researchers. The rule states that no subsidy is given to any of the authors of an article if X/N is smaller than 250 TL. We use this discontinuity to provide evidence that Turkish researchers limit their number of co-authors in order to receive publication subsidies.