Different policy instruments and the threshold effects on collaboration efficiency in China

University–industry R&D collaboration is an important means to improve innovation efficiency; many governments have issued policies to promote it. The most frequent policy instruments implemented by policy-makers to foster firms’ innovation are subsidies and tax incentives. The article elaborated on how subsidies and tax incentives influence the R&D collaboration efficiency through a panel dataset from 2009 to 2015 in China. The result showed that subsidies and tax incentives have a positive effect on collaboration efficiency, and the effect of subsidies on output is bigger than that of tax incentives. Taking the intensity of subsidy as a threshold variable, there is a significant single threshold effect on collaboration efficiency. However, there is no threshold effect when the intensity of the tax incentive used as the threshold variable.