Despite the prevalence of R&D support programs, evaluation studies based on explicit differences in support allocation are rare. In this paper, the identification of the causal effect of R&D support on company performance is based on geographic variation in government funding arising from a population-density rule. I find positive impacts on R&D investment, employment, and sales among the participants who were granted an R&D subsidy as a result of additional aggregate R&D support funding in their region. Although there are no instantaneous impacts on productivity, the study provides evidence of long-term productivity gains.

What are the implications of unequal access to innovation careers for the direction of innovation and inequality? Leveraging novel linked datasets in the United States and Finland, we document that innovators create products more likely to be purchased by consumers like them in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, and age. Homophily exists both within narrow product categories and across industries and has been stable in recent decades. Incorporating this “social push” channel into a growth model, we estimate that unequal access to innovation careers has a large effect on cost of living inequality and long-run growth.