Modeling R&D spillovers to productivity: The effects of tax credits

Abstract

How much stimuli that should be attributed to R&D investments crucially depends on how the benefits of R&D reverberate throughout the economy. An extensive literature has found major spillover effects from R&D investments from one industry to another. Using a macroeconomic model for a small open economy, we analyze how tax credits stimulate R&D through the user cost of capital and how it impacts the economy in general via knowledge flows from R&D capital. We find that a tax credit scheme that lowers the user cost of R&D capital, leads to a gradual increase in aggregate productivity. In the long run, the levels of output, real wages, and consumption are around one percent higher than the baseline.