The Effectiveness of R&D Tax Credits : Cross-Industry Evidence

This paper presents new estimates of the efficacy of R&D tax incentives using cross-country cross-industry data and a novel measure of tax policy that incorporates differences in the average capital–labour ratio in R&D investment across industries and variation in the tax treatment of different expenditure types across countries and over time. The results suggest that, in the short run, industry increases R&D investment by 0.24 dollars for every dollar of tax revenue forgone. The results appear to be more robust than estimates based on cross-country or firm-level data