IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/mul/j0hje1/doi10.1430-24638y2007i2p221-242.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do Incentives to Industrial R&D Enhance Research Productivity and Firm Growth? Evidence from the Italian Case

Author

Listed:
  • Monica Merito
  • Silvia Giannangeli
  • Andrea Bonaccorsi

Abstract

This paper aims at contributing to the empirical literature about the impact of R&D subsidies on firm performances by providing recent micro-evidence from Italy. We focus on the last years of the Special Fund for Applied Research (FSRA), the main instrument of industrial research and innovation policy in Italy until 2000, and evaluate its effects on several dimensions of firm performance adopting a counterfactual approach. We controlled for the potential selection bias of public subsidies by combining a non parametric matching procedure with an auxiliary regression in order to account for systematic bias. Results show that the innovative performance improves only temporarily, and no significant differences between grant recipients and non-recipients emerge as far as labour productivity and sales growth are concerned. This evidence suggests that, in our sample of firms, public R&D subsidies were not able to produce any effect in the medium run on any of the outcome variables considered, casting some doubts on the overall efficacy of the public instrument.

Suggested Citation

  • Monica Merito & Silvia Giannangeli & Andrea Bonaccorsi, 2007. "Do Incentives to Industrial R&D Enhance Research Productivity and Firm Growth? Evidence from the Italian Case," L'industria, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 2, pages 221-242.
  • Handle: RePEc:mul:j0hje1:doi:10.1430/24638:y:2007:i:2:p:221-242
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1430/24638
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

    File URL: https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1430/24638
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mul:j0hje1:doi:10.1430/24638:y:2007:i:2:p:221-242. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.rivisteweb.it/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.