I ask whether government-industry commercial R&D grants increase private R&D. Regressing some measure of innovation on the subsidy can establish a correlation between grants and R&D, but it cannot determine whether grants increase firm R&D or whether firms that do more R&D received more grants....

Governments purchase everything from airplanes to zucchini. This paper investigates the role of the technological content of government procurement in innovation. We theoretically show that a shift in the composition of public purchases toward high-tech products translates into higher...