Estimating the macroeconomic effects of investments in public research and innovation is of central interest to policymakers, scientists and the general public alike. Many studies have attempted to provide quantifications of these returns, often finding substantial effects (Carree et al. 2014, Jones and Summers 2020, Comin 2021) in terms of GDP, employment, investment and tax revenues (Roy et al. 2021). Two very recent examples by Schubert (2021) and Allan et al. (2022) analyze the case of Fraunhofer as the biggest organization for applied research in Europe. One of the central findings of these studies was that increasing the Fraunhofer budget by one euro increases GDP by 21 euros.
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