Good value for public money? The case of R&D policy

This paper evaluates the role of public R&D support on Italian manufacturing SMEs’ innovation activities, focusing on innovation output rather than innovation input. Combining information from EPO records and the Capitalia survey, the new data set enables a counterfactual assessment of R&D policy from 2001 to 2003 (2009 is the final year of the post-treatment period). We find that publicly supported firms have higher R&D expenditure regardless of their characteristics, confirming a strong additionality effect of public policies on innovation inputs. However, this additional spending does not increase firms’ probability of patenting or the number of patents in comparison with privately financed R&D.