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The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 99 No. 3 2017

The Effectiveness of R&D Tax Credits

Russell Thomson

Swinburne University of Technology

Abstract

In order to measure the effect of tax credits on private R&D investment, researchers confront the difficult problem of finding an exogenous measure of tax policy that exhibits sufficient variation to support robust identification. This paper takes a new approach based on exploiting differences in the average capital-labor ratio of R&D investment across industries and variation in the tax treatment of different expenditure types across countries and over time. The estimated short-run elasticity is 0.50 which is somewhat more than double previous estimates derived from cross-country analysis.

DOI
10.1162/rest_a_00559
Volume
99
Issue
3
Pages
544-549
Language
en
Sources
openalex crossref

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