Title: Research and development project funding and the efficiency of participating companies - the case of the Austrian general program

Authors: Drinko Kurevija

Addresses: Faculty of Business, Economics and Statistics, University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna, Austria

Abstract: This article analyses the performances of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency's (ARPA) general program. There was no significantly positive shift in best practice frontier for projects between 2009 and 2011. There was a significantly positive shift in the improvement of technology and a significantly negative shift in efficiency for the same period. Fama-MacBeth results show, with sales as the independent variable, that employees and R&D expense are significant but not project income. The stochastic frontier analysis reveals that the null hypothesis of no inefficiency effects is rejected. As anticipated and substantiated, by applying the more appropriate parametric approach, the results did not confirm the findings of Naveh (2005), showing a positive association with initial product development and efficiency. As part of their first phase of product development, the findings suggest the presence of inefficiency effects of firms that participated in ARPA's general program.

Keywords: data envelopment analysis; DEA; Malmquist index; stochastic frontier analysis; SFA; Fama-MacBeth; programs; projects; efficiency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2021.118975

International Journal of Operational Research, 2021 Vol.42 No.2, pp.163 - 189

Received: 31 Mar 2018
Accepted: 19 May 2019
Published online: 16 Nov 2021 *

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