Do public credit guarantees boost R&D and innovation?
利用土耳其信贷担保基金的大样本数据，研究发现获得公共信贷担保的企业在研发支出和高技术出口等创新指标上显著提升，且对已有创新基础的企业效果更大。适合关注信贷政策与创新关系的学者。
Public credit guarantees (PCGs) have been around for a long time, but their use has proliferated during both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic to support the corporate sector and thus economic recovery. Given the scale of these programmes and their likely implications for public finances, existing work on PCGs focuses primarily on whether the provision of public guarantees has improved credit allocation and financial outcomes. In contrast, this paper examines whether PCGs impact firms’ R&D and innovation efforts, utilizing a rich data set from Turkey’s Credit Guarantee Fund—one of the largest schemes of this kind—and employing difference-in-differences and propensity score matching methodologies. We observe significant improvements in both innovation efforts, such as R&D expenditure, and innovation outcomes, such as high-tech exports by firms that received guaranteed loans relative to those that didn’t. We also find that this beneficial impact is substantially larger for firms that were already engaged in innovation activity or had the potential to innovate before participating in the programme. Our findings have important implications for regulatory authorities in their design of credit support programmes.