Impact evaluation of the fiscal incentive system for corporate research & development

• Autor(a) principal: Simões, António Carlos
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/19937
• topic: Fiscal incentives; Research and development - R&D, Matching; Counterfactual impact evaluation; Incentivos fiscais; Investigação e desenvolvimento - I&D, Emparelhamento; Avaliação de impacto contrafactual

The Fiscal Incentive Scheme for Corporate Research and Development (R&D), more commonly known by its acronym SIFIDE has been in force since 1997 with only a small interruption in the fiscal years of 2004 and 2005. Yet, despite its relevance, both financial and institutional, it remains largely unstudied. Using firm-level microdata from four different sources, this dissertation aims fill the gap in the empirical literature and study the impact the incentive has had on the R&D effort of supported firms through the usage of a matching estimator. The findings suggest that SIFIDE had a positive and significant impact while, at the same time, being a cost-effective policy. During the period analysed, from 2006 to 2007, for each euro of forgone tax revenue, between 1.26 and 1.88 euros were spent by the firms which benefited from these tax credits in R&D activities. The results are in line with those of several authors who, in recent years, studied similar incentive schemes in other countries.