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

在大学和政府研究人员不同寻常的合作伙伴关系中，该项目评估了小企业支持计划的增长和创新效果。研究人员采用并扩展了劳动力市场计划评估方法，将行政计划数据与通用的长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和回归相结合的方法，除了估计受试者的基本平均治疗效果外，项目还调查了治疗强度(贷款/赠款规模)，分析了潜在的一般均衡影响，并按项目类型、贷款条件、企业类型和经济背景检验了影响的异质性。这一结果将使人们能够首次严格估计政府计划对企业层面创新和增长的影响。智力优势：除了直接的政策相关性外，该项目还有助于提出关于小企业、增长、创新、金融和财政政策的理论和实证问题。小企业支持计划是否促进了增长和创新？创新以几种方式被代表：销售和就业增长、生产率、偏向技能的就业变化、专利、研发人员和基于调查的措施；该分析将市场扩张效应与商业窃取效应区分开来。贷款项目的结果将通过分析企业层面不同的具体政策干预措施，为增长与金融的辩论做出贡献，从而避免了困扰基于汇总数据的估计的许多计量经济学问题。其他问题涉及公司受到财务约束的程度和政府支出乘数的规模，该项目使用公司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)，以及这种影响在商业周期中如何变化。更广泛的影响：这项研究的更广泛的影响首先表现在对紧迫的政策辩论的贡献上。问题不仅在于支持计划是否平均促进了受援公司的增长和创新，而且这些好处是被负面溢出效应(置换效应)抵消还是被积极溢出效应(例如共享创新)增强，以及它们是否在某些环境(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)或对于某些类型的计划设计(例如资格标准和贷款条件)更有效。由于转型经济体对小额信贷和金融发展的兴趣，以及可供分析的优秀数据，列入罗马尼亚是为了提供国际复制。该项目还在方法论上做出了更广泛的贡献：利用较长的面板数据来扩展匹配方法，引入新类型的多个对照小组以更可信地识别，并开发新的方法来分析经济政策的一般均衡效应。该项目推进了链接和分析不同微观数据集的广泛研究议程，这是经验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许多其他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产生的具体数据将具有相当大的价值，将这些数据提供给其他研究人员可能会产生另一个广泛的影响。博士生可以也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.