We provide comparative evidence on R&D tax credit and subsidy programs by studying whether firms' participation in each program exhibits state dependence and whether cross program interactions exist and are significant. We use a panel of manufacturing Spanish firms, which could use both types of...

Previous work suggests that research and development (R&D) tax credits increase R&D expenditure. We exploit the staggered adoption of state-level R&D tax credits in the United States to examine their effect on innovation itself. In particular, we consider ten commonly-studied patent...

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...

According to theory, direct R&D grants should be used for projects with low private returns, high social returns and high risk. R&D tax credits, on the other hand, allow firms to choose projects freely according to their private returns. Building on the standard R&D capital model, I develop a...

This study examines the effect of research and development subsidies on the private funding of R&D in France. We address this issue from the annual R&D survey over 1985-1997, which provides information about the R&D subsidies given by all the ministries to the firms having at least one full-time...

Financing research and development (R&D) through loans is usually a costly endeavor. Information asymmetry, outcome uncertainty and low collateral value tend to increase the cost of debt. Based on a large panel of heterogeneous firms, this study shows that recipients of public R&D grants, on...

We augment a Schumpeterian growth model with a public basic-research sector to examine how much a country should invest in basic research. We find that the closer the country is to the world’s technological frontier the more the government should invest in basic research. Basic-research...

Empirical evidence suggests that positive externalities from R&D exceed negative ones. According to conventional wisdom, this calls for R&D subsidies. This paper develops a quality-ladder growth model with overlapping generations which evaluates the positive and normative implications of R&D...