Abstract

The paper explores the impact of public R&D policy towards industrial R&D on technological input and output at firm level, exploiting the results of a three years national strategic research project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Research. Since benefits from public R&D subsidies and private R&D investments are generally heterogeneous and have a "skewed" distribution across firms, the authors underline the necessity of taking into account the specific design and institutional characteristics of the incentive instruments and the need of using as causal measure the entire distribution of the treatment effect.