Determinants of public funding for innovation in Chilean firms

Resumen

In this study, different versions of the Innovation Surveys carried out in Chile are used to evaluate the factors that would explain the obtaining of public funding for innovative activities. In order to achieve this, the estimated results from binary election models are contrasted with cross-sectional and pseudo-panel data. It is concluded that with pseudo-panel data it is possible to identify some relevant factors not observed with cross-sectional data, for example those firms that invest in training their workers in R&D activities in the previous year have lower probabilities of obtaining public funding. In addition, the foreign firms have greater probabilities of achieving funding than national firms. The most striking result is that larger firms have greater probability of obtaining public funding, which is contradictory when considering that many public programs declare that they are aimed to support SMEs.