Small Business Programs, Innovation, and Growth: Estimating Policy Effects Using Comprehensive Firm-Level Panel Data

在一个不寻常的合作伙伴关系的大学和政府研究人员一起工作，链接和分析几个非常大的企业级数据库，该项目评估的增长和创新的影响，小企业支持计划。调整和扩展劳动力市场计划评估方法，研究人员将行政计划数据与通用长期面板数据和各种调查数据联系起来。主要的估计方法是基于纵向匹配与回归相结合，除了估计治疗效果的基本平均值外，该项目还调查治疗强度（贷款/赠款规模），分析潜在的一般均衡效应，并根据项目类型，贷款条件，企业类型和经济背景检查效果的异质性。结果将使第一次严格估计政府计划对企业层面的创新和growth.Intellectual优点：除了其直接的政策相关性，这个项目有助于理论和实证问题的小企业，增长，创新，金融和财政政策。小企业支持计划促进增长和创新吗？创新是代理在几个方面：销售和就业增长，生产力，技能偏向的就业变化，专利，研发人员，和调查为基础的措施，分析区分市场扩张业务窃取的影响。贷款计划的结果将有助于增长融资的辩论，通过分析具体的政策干预不同的公司层面，这避免了许多计量经济学的问题，估计基于汇总数据。其他问题涉及到企业的财务约束程度和政府支出乘数的大小，该项目使用企业层面的微观数据来估计政府计划对小企业增长的影响（第一阶段效应），以及它在商业周期中的变化。更广泛的影响：这项研究的更广泛的影响首先表现在对紧急政策辩论的贡献上。问题不仅在于支持计划是否平均增加了受援公司的增长和创新，而且这些好处是否被负面溢出效应（替代效应）抵消或被正面溢出效应（例如，共享创新），以及它们在某些环境中是否更有效（例如，在负面冲击之后），对于某些类型的公司（例如，年轻的初创企业），或者用于某些类型的程序设计（例如，资格标准和贷款条件）。列入罗马尼亚是为了提供国际复制，因为转型经济体对微额信贷和金融发展感兴趣，也因为可用于分析的数据很好。该项目还在方法学上做出了更广泛的贡献：利用长期面板数据扩展匹配方法，引入新类型的多控制组以进行更可信的识别，并开发分析经济政策一般均衡效应的新方法。该项目推进了连接和分析不同微观数据集的广泛研究议程，这是实证经济学最有前途的最新发展之一。这些想法和方法可以作为研究人员分析其他政策的模型，无论是在美国还是在其他许多存在类似项目和数据的国家。该项目通过连接许多大型数据库而产生的具体数据将具有相当大的价值，而将这些数据提供给其他研究人员可能会产生另一种广泛的影响。博士生可以并将受益于学习使用数据，参加专业会议，并在数据和项目的基础上撰写论文。

In an unusual partnership of university and government researchers working together to link and analyze several very large firm-level databases, this project evaluates the growth and innovation effects of small business support programs. Adapting and extending labor market program evaluation methods, the researchers link administrative program data to universal long-panel data and to a variety of survey data. The main estimation method is based on longitudinal matching combined with regression, and besides estimating the basic average treatment effect on the treated, the project investigates treatment intensity (loan/grant size), analyze potential general equilibrium effects, and examine the heterogeneity of effects by type of program, loan conditions, type of firm, and economic context. The results will enable the first rigorous estimates of government program effects on firm-level innovation and growth.Intellectual Merit:In addition to its direct policy relevance, this project contributes to theoretical and empirical questions about small firms, growth, innovation, finance, and fiscal policy. Do small business support programs foster growth and innovation? Innovation is proxied in several ways: sales and employment growth, productivity, skill-biased employment change, patents, R&D personnel, and survey-based measures; the analysis distinguishes market-expanding from business-stealing effects. Results for loan programs will contribute to the growth-finance debate by analyzing specific policy interventions varying at the firm level, which avoids many of the econometric problems plaguing estimates based on aggregate data. Other issues concern the degree to which firms are financially constrained and the size of the government spending multiplier, for which the project uses firm level microdata to estimate the impact of government programs on small business growth (the first-stage effect), and how it varies over the business cycle. Broader Impacts:The broader impacts of this research appear, first, in the contribution to urgent policy debates. The question is not only whether the support programs on average increase growth and innovation at recipient firms, but whether these benefits are offset by negative spillovers (displacement effects) or enhanced by positive spillovers (e.g., shared innovation), and also whether they are more effective in some environments (e.g., after negative shocks), for some types of firms (e.g., young start-ups), or for some types of program design (e.g., eligibility criteria and loan terms). Romania is included to provide an international replication, because of the interest in microcredit and financial development in transition economies, and because of the excellent data available for analysis. The project also makes methodological contributions of broader usefulness: exploiting the long panel data to extend matching methods, introducing new types of multiple control groups for more credible identification, and developing new approaches for analyzing the general equilibrium effects of economic policies. The project advances the broad research agenda of linking and analyzing diverse sets of microdata, one of the most promising recent developments in empirical economics. The ideas and methods could serve as models for researchers analyzing other policies, both in the US and in many other countries where similar programs and data exist. The specific data generated by the project through linking of many large databases will have considerable value, and another broad impact may result from making the data available to other researchers. PhD students can and will benefit from learning to work with the data, participating in professional conferences, and writing dissertations on the basis of the data and project.