The role of Science Parks: a puzzle of growth, innovation and R&D investments

This paper investigates the impact of Science Parks on growth and innova-tiveness of affiliated firms. Both the role and the effectiveness of these policy instrumentsin sustaining tenants’ performances are still open issues. We rely on unique Italian data andcompare the performance of firms located within a park with a control sample of off-parkfirms. Firstly, we focus on the estimation of the treatment effect of being located within thepark. Our results show a significant difference between on and off park firms with respectto their innovativeness and propensity to invest in R&D; to the contrary, firms’ growthappears unaffected by location effects. Secondly, we analyse what features of ScienceParks drive the impact on the diverse measures of performance. Our main finding is thatboth patenting activity and R&D investments are actively sustained by the presence andquantity of research centres within the park. Growth remains a largely unexplained phe-nomenon and Gibrat law is found to hold robustly within the class of on-park firms