Call for papers: Evaluating the Effect of Public Policies on Corporate R&D and Innovation: Processes and Behaviours, Measurement Methods and Indicator

A special issue of World Review of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development

This special issue aims at collecting papers dealing with major advances on the analysis of the effect of public incentives on firm R&D and innovation (RDI). Although to date many studies have provided evidence-based analyses of public incentives’ effectiveness on company RDI, many aspects still needs to be deepened and unfolded, especially along these three different but interconnected streams of inquiry demanding:

• further exploration of the subject in terms of even more precise statistical techniques, especially those incorporating non-linearity and other complexities and accounting for heterogeneity of supported units;
• more in-depth investigation of the processes through which policies take place in specific institutional contexts, with a specific focus on the relation between funding public agencies' and firms' interactive behaviours and strategies;
• better identification of the set of feasible and appropriate indicators required to perform sound evidence-based evaluation and policy guidance in an STI environment.

Papers dealing with these lines of research are greatly welcomed. Both theoretical and empirical works are appreciated. Open to different approaches and theoretical perspectives, this special issue aims at being a place for encouraging board-spectrum discussions and critical appraisals of the subject.

Papers suitable for this special issue should be focused on topics which include (note: all of them refer to “firm level”), but are not limited to:

• Critical reviews of the state-of-the-art of the literature
• New or improved applications of statistical and econometric techniques for RDI policy evaluation
• Institutions and implementation processes of contextual RDI policies (including inter-temporal and cross-country comparative analyses)
• Analysis of the effect of specific RDI policy measures (including case-studies)
• New or improved modelling approaches for agency-firm funding relationships (including principal-agent and agent-based models)
• Design and choice of indicators for ex-ante and ex-post RDI policy evaluation

Important Dates
Extended Abstract submission deadline: 20 June 2010
Full paper submission deadline: 15 October 2010
Author notification - review comments: 30 February 2011
Second review cycle: 30 April 2011 (if needed)
Final manuscript due: 20 June 2011