Doctoral Dissertation Research: The direct and indirect effect of innovation subsidies

支持企业创新的政府补贴是一项普遍的政策。然而，人们对它们在促进发展中国家技术升级和提高公司业绩方面的有效性知之甚少。现有关于这类干预的严谨研究主要集中在发达国家和高科技行业，并从专利和研发支出来推断技术进步。因此，很难将经验教训外推到发展中国家的背景下，在发展中国家，创新集中在采用已经建立的技术和对现有产品进行微小修改，这些产品不适合申请专利，也很难被视为研发。该项目利用直接收集的技术使用数据，调查了发展中国家秘鲁创新补贴的直接和间接影响，从而填补了文献中的这一空白。该项目打开了公司的黑匣子，允许观察当公司收到对创新活动的支持时，公司内部引发的变化，从而揭示政府对创新的支持通过什么机制影响公司业绩。这项研究的结果促进了对创新补贴计划与企业行为之间关系的理解，也为发展中国家和国际合作机构的政策设计提供了参考，这些机构在传播促进生产性发展的干预措施方面发挥了重要作用。该项目的关键挑战是，在研发支出和专利不能用于检测技术变化的背景下，发现技术变化。鉴于企业调查没有定期记录企业使用的生产方法的细节，该项目包括收集申请所分析的补贴计划的公司使用的生产做法的数据。为了建立创新补贴计划与企业行为之间的因果关系，该项目采用了准实验方法。特别是，它利用了补贴分配机制是基于专家分配给申请的分数这一事实。得分高于一定门槛的申请可以获得补贴；而得分较低的申请则不能。这一特性使该设置适合于回归不连续分析。该项目进一步探讨了通过劳动力流动和采购关系产生的溢出效应。这是两个能够在公司之间传递信息的渠道，因此，值得评估它们在多大程度上有助于创新想法的传播和创新补贴的好处。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Government subsidies to support innovation in firms are a widespread policy. However, little is known about their effectiveness to promote technological upgrading and boost firm performance in developing countries. The existing rigorous studies about this type of intervention are focused on developed countries and high-tech industries, and infer technological improvement from patents and R&D expenditure. As a consequence, lessons are hard to extrapolate to the developing country context, where innovation is concentrated on the adoption of already established technologies and on performing small modifications to existing products, which are not suitable for patenting and can be hardly considered R&D. This project fills this gap in the literature by investigating the direct and indirect effects of innovation subsidies in Peru, a developing country, using directly collected data on technology use. The project opens the black box of the firm and allows to observe the changes that are triggered within a company when it receives support for innovative activities, shedding light on the mechanisms through which government support for innovation affects firm performance. The findings of this research advance understanding of the relationship between innovation subsidy programs and firm behavior, and also inform policy design in developing countries and international cooperation institutions, which have played an important role in the diffusion of interventions to promote productive development. The key challenge of the project is detecting technological change in a context in which R&D expenditure and patents cannot be used to do so. Given that details on productive methods used by businesses are not regularly recorded in enterprise surveys, the project includes the collection of data on productive practices used by the firms that applied to the subsidy programs under analysis. To establish a causal relationship between the innovation subsidy programs and firm behavior, the project uses a quasi-experimental method. In particular, it exploits the fact that the subsidy assignment mechanism is based on a score assigned to the applications by experts. Applications with scores above a certain threshold get a change to win the subsidies; while those with lower scores, do not. This characteristic makes the setting suitable for a regression discontinuity analysis. The project further explores spillovers operating through labor mobility and procurement relationships. These are two channels capable of transmitting information between companies and, therefore, it is worth assessing the extent to which they contribute to the diffusion of innovative ideas and of the benefits of innovation subsidies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.