Subsidies to the Norwegian high-tech industries have traditionally been given as "matching grants", i.e. the subsidies are targeted, and the firms have to contribute a 50 % own risk capital to the subsidized projects. Our results suggest that grants do not crowd out privately financed R&D, but...

Empirical examination of whether R&D subsidies crowd out private investments has been hampered by selection problems. A particular worry is that project quality and research intentions may be correlated with the likelihood of receiving subsidies. Using proposal evaluation data to control for...