Une evaluation du credit d’impot recherche en France, 1980-1997

The aim of this article is to evaluate the effect of the cost of R&D capital, and more particularly of the taxcredit on R&D expenditures, introduced in France since 1983, as a fiscal incentive to private R&D. A user cost of R&Dcapital is derived with imperfect capital markets, corporate and shareholders taxation. A special treatment is devoted tothe introduction of the incremental tax credit on R&D expenditures. We propose a decomposition of the user cost ofcapital into four components, which allow us in particular to distinguish two user cost measures with or without theR&D tax credit. We rely on this decomposition to assess the specific effect of the R&D tax credit in the framework ofan econometric mo del estimated on a panel of French Manufacturing firms over the period 1980-1997. The effect of theuser cost on R&D is thus identified by the changes in the tax policies during the estimation period, and more preciselythe changes in the statutory rate of R&D tax credit, and definitions of its floor and ceiling.Although future demand prospects remain the main determinant of firm investment in R&D, we find that the reductionin user cost of R&D capital, mainly induced by the R&D tax credit, has a large significant positive effect. We thusestimate that a permanent increase of the rate of this tax credit by 10 % would lead to a development of R&Dinvestment and capital of 3% to 5.5%, which will correspond to an increase of R&D of the order of 2 to 3.5 times theannual cost of this measure for the government budget. Such effect may seem very large, and our results will have to beconfirmed in future work, in particular on the more recent period, and if possible not only on the basis of the simulatedcost of the R&D tax credit, but also on the basis of data on the actual cost of (which is at the firm level a confidentialinformation).