Government support of innovation in small businesses: North Carolina's Green Business Fund.

摘要

This dissertation examines, from an economic program evaluation perspective, North Carolina's Green Business Fund (the Fund), a state-level grants program to provide support for small businesses conducting R&D related to sustainability technologies. The evaluation of the Fund follows both traditional evaluation and statistical-based evaluation methodologies. The traditional economic evaluation herein presents an extension of an economic model that allows one to estimate the benefit-to-cost ratio of a program under the particular data-limitations that are present in this work. The results of the traditional evaluation suggest that the Fund resulted in a positive net social surplus. Specifically, if one assumes that the elasticities of demand for innovations developed by the Fund are similar to those in a competitive market, the benefit-to-cost ratio associated with the Fund is estimated to be greater than 2.0. To supplement the traditional evaluation methodologies, econometric analyses are conducted to examine the relationship between key program outcomes and firm- and project-characteristics. The findings from these analyses suggest that the roles of external investment and university partnerships are related to the creation of new jobs, the development of intellectual property, and the generation of revenues.