Intended and unintended effects of public incentives for innovation. Quasi-experimental evidence from Italy

Giovanni Mellace and Marco Ventura

No 9/2019, Discussion Papers on Economics from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper provides an extensive empirical evaluation of a policy introduced in Italy at the end of 2012 to incentivize young innovative start-up firms. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) we estimate the causal effects of the policy on the firms’ share of intangible assets, turnover, number of employees, and number of partners. Our results indicate that two years after its implementation the policy was effective only in increasing the number of partners, thus attracting private investments, but failed, at least in the short run, in boosting innovation or increasing employment. It follows that the new investors generated by the policy might have been attracted only by the tax benefit and had little interest in innovation.

Keywords: Policy evaluation; regression discontinuity design; incentives to innovations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 H32 L52 O31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23 pages
Date: 2019-08-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-eur, nep-ino and nep-tid
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Related works:
Working Paper: Intended and unintended effects of public incentives for innovation. Quasi-experimental evidence from Italy (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:sdueko:2019_009

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