The Intellectual Spoils of War? Defense R&D, Productivity, and International Spillovers
Abstract We examine the impact of government funding for R&D—and defense-related R&D in particular—on privately conducted R&D and its ultimate effect on productivity growth. We estimate longitudinal models that relate privately funded R&D to lagged government-funded R&D using industry-country level data from OECD countries and firm level data from France. To deal with the potentially endogenous allocation of government R&D funds, we use changes in predicted defense R&D as an…