Innovation Policy and Economic Growth

• Autores: Dirk Czarnitzki, Otto Toivanen
• Localización: Economic papers, ISSN 1725-3187, Nº. 482, 2013, págs. 1-44
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper establishes theoretically a link between investments in economic growth and investments in R&D. This raises the importance of innovation policies as they are designed to narrow the gap between the socially optimal and the privately optimal levels of R&D. As innovation policies may be subject to crowding-out effects, we, second, empirically test whether R&D subsidies stimulate private investment in two countries of the European economic area. We employ Belgian and German firm level data for estimating treatment effects models. It turns out that public R&D grants stimulate private investments in both countries. Furthermore, the estimated treatment effects vary with the innovation experience of firms and their past labor producivity.