한국생산성학회

SMEs play a key role for the national competitiveness and innovation. However, SMEs, unlike the major companies, are suffering from the asymmetric information in labour and capital market. In this respect, the government enforces various policies for resolving the asymmetric information. The main purpose of this paper is to quantitatively evaluate the performance improvement of R&D supported firms in the non-electric applications of nuclear science and technology. Despite the fact that the non-electric applications of nuclear science and technology have a large impact on other industries, there is a lack of support for such fields. In other words, there is a need for a variety of policy studies in this area, as the impact of government support in this sector can be relatively large. Methodologically, Propensity Score Matching(PSM) and Difference in Difference(DID) methodologies were applied to solve the selection bias and endogeneity problem between the policy variables and the performance variables. With this methodology, we compared the performance in three dimensions, which include firms’ growth, creation of employment, and innovation performance. According to the result of empirical analysis, it was found that the R&D supported SMEs had significantly improved performance compared to the non-supported companies. First, the government R&D support has shown positive effects on corporate sales growth and asset growth. Especially, the government R&D support has played a role in compensating “the market failure” in the capital and labour market. In addition, it was found that the government R&D support has played a role in increasing the firm’s own R&D expenditure, so called “crowding-in” effect. These results show that the government's R&D support for nuclear non-electric application sector has shown a considerable effect and it is necessary to continue to provide policy support in the future.