Suchergebnisse

Economic interest in innovation policy largely arises from the fundamental importance of innovation to social welfare and from well-known inefficiencies in innovation in a competitive market environment. As a result, a wide variety of public innovation policies are used in practice. This report reviews the economic justifications for public innovation policies and compares the existing policy tools, paying particular attention to the Finnish innovation policy environment.

We study the interaction between private and public funding of innovative projects in the presence of adverse-selection based financing constraints. Government programmes allocating direct subsidies are based on ex-ante screening of the subsidy applications. This selection scheme may yield valuable information to market-based financiers. We find that under certain conditions, public R&D subsidies can reduce the financing constraints of technology-based entrepreneurial firms. Firstly, the subsidy itself reduces the capital costs related to innovation projects by reducing the amount of market-based capital required. Secondly, the observation that an entrepreneur has received a subsidy for an innovation project provides an informative signal to market-based financiers. We also find that public screening works more efficiently if it is accompanied by subsidy allocation.

The banking system is known to be vulnerable to self‐fulfilling crises that are caused by depositors' co‐ordination failure. We show that transparency regulation may prevent certain types of systemic crisis by eliminating the possibility of coordination failure. (J.E.L.: G21, G28).