Seminar jointly organized with TUM, TUM Main Campus, seminar room 0505.2544 (entrance from Luisenstraße/Theresienstraße, 2nd floor)
Knowledge spillovers drive a wedge between private and social returns to R&D. Efficient innovation policy assigns subsidies to fields where spillovers are relatively important. We develop new measures for the private and spillover value of patented innovations and embed these in a structural microeconomic model to estimate field-specific marginal returns to R&D support. We find that expected returns to subsidy vary strongly by field and country, suggesting that targeted innovation policy has large potential to increase welfare. Because spillovers cross country borders unevenly, supranational coordination of innovation policy offers large potential efficiency gains, especially for smaller countries.
Contact: Fabian Gaessler