This paper provides new empirical evidence about the impact of various technological policies upon firms' innovative behaviour. We take into consideration the role of policies for innovative activities and we focus on their interaction. While supply-side policies such as R&D subsidies and tax credits have been both extensively discussed in the literature and empirically investigated, the analysis of innovative public procurement is a growing trend in the literature, which still lacks robust empirical evidence. In this paper, we replicate the existing results on supply-side policies, surmise fresh empirical evidence on the outcome of innovative public procurement, and address the issue of possible interaction among the various tools. When controlling for the interaction with other policies, supply-side subsidies cease to be as effective as reported in previous studies and innovative public procurement seems to be more effective than other tools. The preliminary evidence suggests that technology policies exert the highest impact when different policies interact.

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The EU General Data Protection Regulation is supposed to introduce several innovations, including the right of data portability for data subjects. In this article, we review recent literature documenting experiments to assess users' valuation of personal data, with the purpose to provide policy-oriented remarks. In particular, contextual aspects, conflicts between declared and revealed preferences, as well as the suggestion that personal data is not conceivable as a single good, but instead as a bundle, are taken into account, also discussing potential shortcomings and pitfalls in the surveyed experiments. Data portability is supposed to increase consumer empowerment; still, several technological preconditions need to apply to make this right actually enforceable.

This study provides the first quantification of buyers' role in the outcome of R&D procurement contracts. We combine together four data sources on US federal R&D contracts, follow-on patented inventions, federal public workforce characteristics, and perception of their work environment. By exploiting the observability of deaths of federal employees, we find that managers' death events negatively affect innovation outcomes: a 1% increase in the share of relevant public officer deaths causes a decline of 32.3% of patents per contract, 20.5% patent citations per contract, and 34.3% patent claims per contract.These effects are driven by the deaths occurring in the 6 months before the contract is awarded, thereby indicating the relevance of the design and award stage relative to ex post contract monitoring. Lower levels of self-reported within-office cooperation also negatively impact R&D outcomes.