The rate of return to investment in R&D: The case of research infrastructures

Chiara Del Bo

Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 2016, vol. 112, issue C, 26-37

Abstract: The return to R&D investment and activities has been the object of a vast literature, both from a theoretical and empirical perspective. The aim of this overview is to present a selection of contributions to underscore the main shared findings and highlight open issues, while also providing a preliminary analysis of the returns to R&D investment in large research infrastructures (RIs) in Europe. First, a common methodological framework is distilled from the macro-literature, examining the return to R&D in aggregate terms. Then, the evaluation in the context of specific projects, mainly in large RIs, is examined, followed by the explicit consideration of externalities and spillover effects of research activities. A novel empirical analysis of European RIs is also presented, based on a novel data set, to highlight trends and suggest new avenues for the evaluation of the rate of return to investments in research infrastructures, using both a cost effectiveness ratio and a bibliometric citation count as metrics to evaluate the return to R&D investment in these facilities. Directions for future research are sketched in the concluding section.

Keywords: Return to R&D; Cost benefit analysis; Spillovers; Cost effectiveness ratio; Citation analysis; Research infrastructures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 O3 O4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0040162516300208
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:tefoso:v:112:y:2016:i:c:p:26-37

DOI: 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.02.018

Access Statistics for this article

Technological Forecasting and Social Change is currently edited by Fred Phillips

More articles in Technological Forecasting and Social Change from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().