Publication of 10-02-2016

The dose-response function approach for the evaluation of continuous treatments in R&D subsidies

Series: Articoli

Published in Scienze Regionali. Italian Journal of Regional Science , 2015, supplement to n. 3, special issue on “Ex-post assessment of firms incentives in local economies”

A recent stream in the program evaluation literature has focussed on the estimation of causal effects in the presence of continuous treatments. Dose-response functions based on propensity-score methodologies can be employed, under the unconfoundedness assumption, to perform this analysis. An interesting area of application is that of R&D subsidisation programmes, where little is known about what is the right size of subsidies or of the underlying private investments to be targeted. Focussing on a regional small-business R&D programme implemented in Italy, we estimate a flexible dose-response function and find a roughly inverse U-shaped relation between subsidy and future R&D investment.

Author: Chiara Bocci, Marco Mariani

TAGS: R&D subsidies, dose-response functions, generalized propensity score

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