R&D Spillovers for Public R&D Productivity

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically investigates whether the productivity of a public (government-funded) R&D project improves when the aggregate R&D investment in the same technology field increases. Based on the unique project level data that cover almost entire public R&D projects in Korea, this paper shows that aggregate investment in other public R&D projects in the same technology field increases a public R&D project’s outputs both independent of its project expenditure (additive spillover effects) and interactive with its project expenditure (multiplicative spillover effects). The spillover effects from the aggregate private R&D investment in the same technology field also exist, but to a much lesser extent.

KEYWORDS:

• R&D spillover effects
• public R&D productivity
• NTIS

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• O32
• O38

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://nsf.gov/statistics/2018/nsb20181/report/sections/overview/r-d-expenditures-and-r-d-intensity

2 Typical project durations range from one to three years.

3 These data are offered by KISTEP's R&D Activity Survey Report. This report provides R&D personnel status (sex, degree, major, age, etc.) and R&D expenses (by R&D stage, funding resources, items, etc.) of total R&D activities in Korea every year.

4 According to the 6T classification, the research field is largely divided into six promising technologies and then code numbers are assigned according to the subclassification.