This paper presents an ex post evaluation of the 2008 reform of the French research tax credit. The tax scheme was massively overhauled, with a switch to a pure volume-based design, leading to a large increase in the number of firms applying and an important increase in the cost of the scheme....

We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...