Daniel Gama e Colombo and Helio Nogueira da Cruz
This paper evaluates the effects of tax incentives on business innovation in Brazil that were established by Law 11,196/05 (the “Fiscal Incentives Law”) to test whether they have…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper evaluates the effects of tax incentives on business innovation in Brazil that were established by Law 11,196/05 (the “Fiscal Incentives Law”) to test whether they have had a positive impact on beneficiary firms' innovation input and output and on their performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The policy impacts are estimated using microdata on 13,706 firms available in the 2008 and 2011 editions of the Brazilian Innovation Survey (PINTEC) and by applying propensity score matching with difference-in-differences.
Findings
The results suggest a positive and statistically significant impact of the policy on research and development (R&D) expenditures (average of approximately US$ 264,000 in 2011), the number of research staff (average of five researchers) and total employment (approximately 5% of the beneficiary firms' mean size). However, no impact was found on the overall spending on innovative activities, the percentage of sales and exports from new products, net revenue or net revenue per employee.
Practical implications
The findings provide empirical support in favor of tax incentives as a policy tool to boost business innovation in the country. However, the absence of significant effects on innovative activities expenditures and on most indicators of innovation output and firms' performance reveals shortcomings of the policy that need to be addressed.
Originality/value
The study complements and advances the findings of previous studies by assessing policy impact on total innovative activities expenditures and on innovation output and firm performance.
Details
Keywords
Serena Racis, Alessandro Spano and Giorgio Latti
This study aims to apply Process Mining (PM) techniques to identify the critical elements that primarily affect the trials’ duration and suggest the best practices to enable their…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to apply Process Mining (PM) techniques to identify the critical elements that primarily affect the trials’ duration and suggest the best practices to enable their more efficient execution, reduce their duration and, consequently, create public value, through a case study conducted in an Italian Civil Court.
Design/methodology/approach
Through PM analyses and in-depth discussions with the court staff, we analysed the trials with the longest duration and those belonging to a specific subject matter to identify peculiar features and inefficiencies that prolong the trials’ duration.
Findings
Our results highlight how innovative tools like PM can revolutionise the judicial system by providing judges with objective trials data that can support and facilitate the entire trials’ definition. However, many issues, especially related to the little spread data culture and process-oriented approach in courts, are highly present, leading to data inconsistencies and subsequent difficulties in trials’ analysis and interpretation.
Originality/value
Little research has devoted attention to the PM potential to enhance the judiciary. Our study contributes to this strand, yet adopting a different approach: it investigates the trials’ excessive length by focusing on bottlenecks and inefficient activities that slow down trials and identifies activities’ thresholds to monitor the trials’ execution and limit delays.