Subsidy program for innovative SMEs and start-ups: aids efficiency and market structure characteristics – a case study in France
This research work, carried out as part of Anna Malessan's thesis, concerns the impact assessment of innovation subsidy policies. More specifically, the research should focus on aids distributed within the context of the Future Investment Programme (2010-2020). Our main hypothesis: one-stop aid schemes are too broad to enable sectoral differences in barriers to innovation, leading to anticipated social losses. Our proposed identification strategy: The impact of innovation aids is influenced by the introduction of proxies capturing certain market characteristics known to affect companies' abilities to innovate (contestation, suitability, synergy, technological content, barriers to entry). In this respect, our work is in keeping with the literature on the complementarity and substitutability of private and public financing of innovation, but also with the literature on the cost-effectiveness of public policies for innovation.