The effects of governmental financing on firms' R&D activities: a theoretical and empirical investigation

There is a long history of governmental support for private innovative activity in the U.S.A. However, the economic research on this topic has been narrow in focus, emphasizing primarily the relationship between the level of governmental R&D and the corresponding (in a causal sense) level of private R&D. In this paper, we explore the effects of governmental financing on another aspect of private innovative behavior-the sharing by firms of innovation-related knowledge. Based on a simple model of private innovative activity in the face of an exogenous governmental R&D contracts/grants structure, we find, among other things, that governmental R&D allocations spur industrial R&D laboratories toward greater sharing of their innovation-related knowledge.