Do tax incentives for research increase firm innovation? An RD design for R&D

Antoine Dechezleprêtre, Elias Einio, Ralf Martin, Kieu-Trang Nguyen and John van Reenen

No 230, GRI Working Papers from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment

Abstract: We present the first evidence showing causal impact of research and development (R&D) tax incentives on innovation outcomes. We exploit a change in the asset-based size thresholds for eligibility for R&D tax subsidies and implement a Regression Discontinuity Design using administrative tax data on the population of UK firms. There are statistically and economically significant effects of the tax change on both R&D and patenting, with no evidence of a decline in the quality of innovation. R&D tax price elasticities are large at about 2.6, probably because the treated group is from a sub-population subject to financial constraints. There does not appear to be prepolicy manipulation of assets around the thresholds that could undermine our design, but firms do adjust assets to take advantage of the subsidy post-policy. We estimate that over 2006-11 business R&D would be around 10% lower in the absence of the tax relief scheme.

Date: 2016-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-acc, nep-eur, nep-ino, nep-pbe and nep-sbm
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (98)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/wp-content/ ... ezlepretre-et-al.pdf

Related works:
Working Paper: Do tax incentives for research increase firm innovation? An RD Design for RD (2016)
Working Paper: Do tax Incentives for Research Increase Firm Innovation? An RD Design for R&D (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:lsg:lsgwps:wp230

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in GRI Working Papers from Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The GRI Administration ().