The international mobility of researchers has been central to the policy-makers' agendas for several decades. Despite the growing presence of mobility grants within public funding agencies' portfolios, empirical evidence on their effects remains scant. In this paper, we contribute to the literature by studying the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships, the flagship program of the EU, providing competitive grants to researchers to spend a research period abroad. Based on data for the universe of applicants to the Seventh Framework Programme (2007-2013), we exploit the discontinuity in grant assignment to uncover causal effects on individual researchers. Results show that Individual Fellowships are indeed conducive to higher chances of experiencing mobility to the scientists' country of choice. While we do not find an average impact of mobility grants on publication outcomes or number of new co-authors, we document interesting heterogeneous effects: grants supporting extra-European mobility, as opposed to those supporting mobility within Europe, generally yield more positive effects across most outcomes. This suggests that grants are most effective when targeting mobility flows subject to larger frictions.

The paper examines whether competitive R&D grants incentivize private firms to pursue innovation in unexplored directions or more conventional ones. We use applicant-level data from the largest European program awarding R&D grants to individual small and medium-sized enterprises. We find that having unconventional patents before the program or submitting an atypical proposal does not affect ranking or the likelihood of winning, thus yielding no evidence of systematic bias against novelty in grant allocation. We then exploit the discontinuity in the program design to infer the effects of grants and find that: i) they induce firms to innovate in domains that are new and distant from their past technological trajectories; ii) they increase the likelihood of introducing unconventional patents without increasing the chances of filing conventional ones. These results are driven by firms that are cash-constrained, which is consistent with the idea that financial frictions hinder more risky and experimental research endeavors.

Policy-makers and scholars often assume that a higher incidence of high-growth firms (HGFs) is synonymous with vibrant regional economic dynamics, and that HGF shares are persistent over time as Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) have slowly-changing features. In this paper we test these hypotheses, which are deeply rooted in the EE literature. We draw upon Eurostat data for up to 20 countries over the period 2008-2020 and study HGF shares in NUTS-3 regions in Europe. Analysis of regional rankings yields the puzzling finding that the leading EEs in Europe, apparently, are in places such as southern Spain and southern Italy. These places would not normally be considered Europe’s foremost entrepreneurial hotspots. Additional results do not provide strong support for the hypothesis that more developed regions feature higher HGF shares. We do find evidence consistent with HGF shares displaying persistency over time. However, we show that more developed regions do not have higher persistence in their HGF shares, and that the strength in persistence does not increase across the HGFs distribution, which does not support path-dependency as the main mechanism behind the observed persistence. Overall, we call for a more nuanced interpretation of both regional HGF shares and the EEs literature.