 The role of peer effects in firms’ usage of R&D tax exemptionsStijn Kelchtermans, Daniel Neicu and Peter Teirlinck Journal of Business Research, 2020, vol. 108, issue C, 74-91 Abstract: Survey evidence suggests that firms are insufficiently aware of newly introduced R&D support measures due to the complexity of the public support landscape. As a result, adoption is slow and incomplete, which implies that eligible firms leave money on the table. We hypothesize that a key coping mechanism involves firms relying on their peers’ behaviour to inform their own adoption decision. We test this hypothesis by analysing firms' first use of a newly-introduced R&D tax exemption scheme in Belgium. We identify endogenous peer effects in industry- and location-based peer groups by exploiting the intransitivity in firms’ networks as well as variation in peer group size. The results show that firms’ decisions to use R&D tax exemptions are influenced by the choices of their peers, primarily in the time window immediately following their introduction. The findings suggest that the efficacy of R&D policy can be improved by accounting for the structure of firm networks in the communication of new support initiatives. Keywords: Peer effects; Information diffusion; R&D tax exemptions; Innovation policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jbrese:v:108:y:2020:i:c:p:74-91 DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.09.059 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier |
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