The Italian Startup Act: Empirical evidence of policy effects

Francesco Biancalani, Dirk Czarnitzki and Massimo Riccaboni

No 648452, Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven

Abstract: Using a difference-in-difference approach this paper analyses the impact of the Italian Startup Act entered into force in December 2012. This law provides special benefits (e.g. tax incentives, public loan guarantees, tailor-made labor law, cuts to red tape and fees) for firms registered as “innovative startups” in Italy. This special legislation has been implemented by the Italian government to increase innovativeness of small and young enterprises by facilitating improved access to external capital and (high-skilled) labor. Consequently, our goal is to assess the impact of the policy on equity, debt and employment. Overall, we find that the Italian startup policy has met its primary objectives. The treated firms operating under this program show more capacity to collect equity and debt, and also achieve higher levels of employment than untreated, comparable firms.

Keywords: start up; innovation policy; firm subsidies; small firms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33
Date: 2020-01-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-sbm and nep-tid
Note: paper number MSI_2002
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in FEB Research Report MSI_2002

Downloads: (external link)
https://lirias.kuleuven.be/retrieve/562589 Published version (application/pdf)

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:ete:msiper:648452

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven from KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Department of Management, Strategy and Innovation, Leuven
Bibliographic data for series maintained by library EBIB ().