This paper studies whether the Italian Mezzogiorno’s investment tax-credit (2016-2019) fostered regional innovation leveraging both a 1980-2019 patent-data panel of 91 NUTS-3 provinces and Differences-in-Differences-based (DiD) designs, finding a delayed, robust increase in forward-citation weighted patent fractional-counts per-capita associated to the policy, but no effects on unweighted patenting or inventors’ number, suggesting quality upgrading rather than extensive-margin expansion.
Innovation effects of place-based investment-incentives: Evidence from Italy
Simone Robbiano
2026-01-01
Abstract
This paper studies whether the Italian Mezzogiorno’s investment tax-credit (2016-2019) fostered regional innovation leveraging both a 1980-2019 patent-data panel of 91 NUTS-3 provinces and Differences-in-Differences-based (DiD) designs, finding a delayed, robust increase in forward-citation weighted patent fractional-counts per-capita associated to the policy, but no effects on unweighted patenting or inventors’ number, suggesting quality upgrading rather than extensive-margin expansion.
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