Spillover-effekter af danske virksomheders energiforskning og øvrige forskning

In recent years there has been a drastic increase in public research subsidies earmarked for private energy research in Denmark. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether relatively high subsidies to private energy research can be justified by higher external spillover effects from private energy research compared to other private research. Estimation of spillover effects are carried out using an unbalanced panel of more than a thousand Danish private companies observed over the period 1999 to 2007. Our results suggest that the external rate of return due to external knowledge spillovers account for approximately a seventh of overall social return of private research. We reject that there are higher spillover from private energy research as compared to other types of private research. Instead the results suggest that external spil lover effects of energy research may be lower than for other types of private research. This implies that subsidies earmarked for private energy research should not be an element in a first best policy to reduce CO2-emission.