The impact of R&D subsidies on firm innovation
Raffaello Bronzini () and
Paolo Piselli
No 960, Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area
Abstract:
This paper evaluates the impact of an R&D subsidy program implemented in a region of northern Italy on innovation by beneficiary firms. In order to verify whether the subsidies enabled firms to increase patenting activity, we exploit the mechanism used to allot the funds. Since only projects that scored above a certain threshold received the subsidy, we use a sharp regression discontinuity design to compare the number of patent applications, and the probability of submitting one, of subsidized firms with those of unsubsidized firms close to the cut-off. We find that the program had a significant impact on the number of patents, more markedly in the case of smaller firms. Our results show that the program was also successful in increasing the probability of applying for a patent, but only in the case of smaller firms.
Keywords: research and development; investment incentives; regression discontinuity design; patents (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H2 L10 R0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-cse, nep-eur, nep-ind, nep-ino, nep-ipr, nep-pr~, nep-knm, nep-law, nep-ppm, nep-sbm and nep-tid
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/temi-disc ... 0960/en_tema_960.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: The impact of R&D subsidies on firm innovation (2016) 
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bdi:wptemi:td_960_14
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in Temi di discussione (Economic working papers) from Bank of Italy, Economic Research and International Relations Area Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().