Bio:

He is Professor at the TIK Centre, University of Oslo. He has a PhD from the University of Oslo (2004) and a PhD from the University of Rome La Sapienza (2005). He has been Director of the TIK Centre between 2014 and 2022. His research is in the economics of innovation, with a particular focus on the impacts of new technologies on the economic performance of firms, sectors and national systems. Castellacci serves as Advisory Editor for Research Policy, and Associate Editor for the Journal of Economic Surveys and for Industrial and Corporate Change.

Link to CV / Personal website: https://www.sv.uio.no/tik/english/people/aca/fulvioca/

Abstract:

Many countries provide public policy support for R&D networks. In publicly funded R&D consortia, firms collaborate with each other and with public scientific institutions to carry out joint innovation projects. The idea behind these policy schemes is that collaborative innovation enables firms to benefit from knowledge spillovers within R&D networks. Surprisingly, however, there is no empirical research showing that spillover effects actually exist in publicly funded R&D consortia. This paper seeks to investigate the extent and sources of knowledge spillovers in R&D networks and to distinguish them from other drivers of additionality generated by collaborative innovation policy programs. Our empirical analysis refers to the case of Norway, where different policy programs have supported R&D in the last two decades. We consider the entire population of Norwegian firms supported under these policy programs, i.e. more than 15 000 collaborative projects between 2002 and 2021. Based on the information on each project, we construct networks of innovators and new R&D spillover pool variables. We use a spatial autoregressive econometric approach and estimate a network regression estimator that endogenizes peer effects related to knowledge spillovers. The econometric results show that the knowledge spillovers arising from publicly funded R&D networks are positive but small, and that they have been become weaker over time. We also find that spillovers arising from R&D subsidy programs are much stronger than those from tax incentives schemes; and that spillovers are much stronger for collaborations among firms that are in the same industry.