IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedhwp/97212.html

R&D Subsidy and Import Substitution: Growing in the Shadow of Protection

Author

Abstract

I study the effect of an innovation subsidy on the growth of firms in a developing country. Using administrative microdata for Brazil and difference-in-differences, I find that innovation subsidies drive firm growth by facilitating firm entry into high-tariff markets with domestically produced versions of foreign goods. After receiving an innovation subsidy, firms issue more patents, expand their workforce, and diversify their product line. However, these patents receive minimal citations, while also heavily citing foreign patents. Firms increase imports of foreign inputs and expand their product line towards products with high import tariff. Despite that, in the most conservative estimate, every $1 of innovation subsidy generated $10 in present value wages.

Suggested Citation

  • Gustavo de Souza, 2023. "R&D Subsidy and Import Substitution: Growing in the Shadow of Protection," Working Paper Series WP 2023-37, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:97212
    DOI: 10.21033/wp-2023-37
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.21033/wp-2023-37
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.21033/wp-2023-37?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Diego Restuccia, 2004. "Barriers to Capital Accumulation and Aggregate Total Factor Productivity," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 45(1), pages 225-238, February.
    2. Raffaello Bronzini & Eleonora Iachini, 2014. "Are Incentives for R&D Effective? Evidence from a Regression Discontinuity Approach," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 6(4), pages 100-134, November.
    3. Manelici, Isabela & Pantea, Smaranda, 2021. "Industrial policy at work: Evidence from Romania’s income tax break for workers in IT," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 133(C).
    4. Irwin, Douglas A., 2000. "Did Late-Nineteenth-Century U.S. Tariffs Promote Infant Industries? Evidence from the Tinplate Industry," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 60(2), pages 335-360, June.
    5. Stefan Wager & Susan Athey, 2018. "Estimation and Inference of Heterogeneous Treatment Effects using Random Forests," Journal of the American Statistical Association, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 113(523), pages 1228-1242, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Elodie Andrieu & John Morrow, 2024. "Can Firm Subsidies Spread Growth?," PSE Working Papers halshs-04747880, HAL.
    2. Elodie Andrieu & John Morrow, 2024. "Can Firm Subsidies Spread Growth?," PSE Working Papers halshs-04721319, HAL.
    3. Andrieu, Elodie & Morrow, John, 2024. "Can firm subsidies spread growth?," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 126775, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Gustavo de Souza & Gabriel Garber, 2025. "R&D Subsidy and Import Substitution: growing in the shadow of protection," Working Papers Series 631, Central Bank of Brazil, Research Department.
    2. Choi, Jaedo & Levchenko, Andrei A., 2025. "The long-term effects of industrial policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 152(C).
    3. Fayssal Ayad, 2026. "Lessons of the Vergangenheit: optimal policy learning of innovation subsidies," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 70(4), pages 1-37, April.
    4. Masahito AMBASHI & Naoyuki HARAOKA & Fukunari KIMURA & Yasuyuki SAWADA & Masakazu TOYODA & Shujiro URATA, 2025. "New Industrial Policies to Achieve Sustainable Asia-Wide Economic Development," Working Papers DP-2024-34, Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia (ERIA).
    5. ZHANG,Hongyong & CHENG,Wenyin & LIANG,David Tao & Meng,Bo, 2024. "Industrial Subsidies along Domestic Value Chains and their Impacts on China’s Exports," IDE Discussion Papers 937, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
    6. Lechner, Michael, 2018. "Modified Causal Forests for Estimating Heterogeneous Causal Effects," IZA Discussion Papers 12040, IZA Network @ LISER.
    7. William Arbour, 2021. "Can Recidivism be Prevented from Behind Bars? Evidence from a Behavioral Program," Working Papers tecipa-683, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    8. Alexandre Belloni & Victor Chernozhukov & Denis Chetverikov & Christian Hansen & Kengo Kato, 2018. "High-dimensional econometrics and regularized GMM," CeMMAP working papers CWP35/18, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    9. Dimitris Bertsimas & Agni Orfanoudaki & Rory B. Weiner, 2020. "Personalized treatment for coronary artery disease patients: a machine learning approach," Health Care Management Science, Springer, vol. 23(4), pages 482-506, December.
    10. Jiang, Mobing & Chen, Xinyu & Xiao, Mingyue & Zhang, Yuning & Wen, Wu & Chen, Xiaohua, 2025. "From connect to conquer: capital market liberalization and Chinese firms' cross-border mergers and acquisitions," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    11. Justin Whitehouse & Qizhao Chen & Morgane Austern & Vasilis Syrgkanis, 2025. "Inference on Optimal Policy Values and Other Irregular Functionals via Softmax Smoothing," Papers 2507.11780, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2026.
    12. Nicolaj N. Mühlbach, 2020. "Tree-based Synthetic Control Methods: Consequences of moving the US Embassy," CREATES Research Papers 2020-04, Department of Economics and Business Economics, Aarhus University.
    13. Kyle Colangelo & Ying-Ying Lee, 2019. "Double debiased machine learning nonparametric inference with continuous treatments," CeMMAP working papers CWP72/19, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    14. Ceyhun Elgin & Ferda Erturk, 2016. "Is Informality a Barrier to Convergence?," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 36(4), pages 2556-2568.
    15. Shonosuke Sugasawa & Hisashi Noma, 2021. "Efficient screening of predictive biomarkers for individual treatment selection," Biometrics, The International Biometric Society, vol. 77(1), pages 249-257, March.
    16. Caloffi, Annalisa & Colovic, Ana & Rizzoli, Valentina & Rossi, Federica, 2023. "Innovation intermediaries' types and functions: A computational analysis of the literature," Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Elsevier, vol. 189(C).
    17. Ruoxuan Xiong & Allison Koenecke & Michael Powell & Zhu Shen & Joshua T. Vogelstein & Susan Athey, 2021. "Federated Causal Inference in Heterogeneous Observational Data," Papers 2107.11732, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.
    18. Arne Henningsen & Guy Low & David Wuepper & Tobias Dalhaus & Hugo Storm & Dagim Belay & Stefan Hirsch, 2024. "Estimating Causal Effects with Observational Data: Guidelines for Agricultural and Applied Economists," IFRO Working Paper 2024/03, University of Copenhagen, Department of Food and Resource Economics.
    19. Areendam Chanda & Beatrice Farkas, 2009. "Technology-Skill Complementarity and International TFP Differences," DEGIT Conference Papers c014_028, DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade.
    20. Aiello, Francesco & Albanese, Giuseppe & Piselli, Paolo, 2019. "Good value for public money? The case of R&D policy," Journal of Policy Modeling, Elsevier, vol. 41(6), pages 1057-1076.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • O3 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Innovation; Research and Development; Technological Change; Intellectual Property Rights
    • O14 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - Industrialization; Manufacturing and Service Industries; Choice of Technology
    • O25 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Development Planning and Policy - - - Industrial Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:fip:fedhwp:97212. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Lauren Wiese (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbchus.html .

    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.