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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

R&D tax incentives and the relabeling problem

Tax incentives appear on 47 recent papers and R&D investment on 267, but R&D tax incentives on only 5, and 26 of 75 incentive papers touch innovation. Governments spend heavily on R&D tax relief. How much of the reported increase in R&D is real research, and how much is ordinary spending relabeled?

accountingeconomicsinnovation

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 75 papers carry a tax-incentive, tax-credit, R&D-tax or super-deduction keyword (47 in economics journals, 16 in finance); "tax incentives" appears on 47 and "R&D tax incentives" on 5. Twenty-six of the 75 also carry an R&D, innovation or patent keyword. "R&D investment" itself appears on 267 papers, one of the most frequent topics in the archive.

Questions#

  • When R&D tax relief becomes more generous, do patents, new products and researcher hiring rise in proportion to reported R&D, or does reported R&D rise alone?
  • Which firms relabel: those near the eligibility threshold, those with weak auditors, those in sectors where the line between R&D and engineering is blurry?
  • Did the US requirement to amortize R&D from 2022 change reported R&D the other way?

Data that could help#

Firm R&D spending and tax relief claims, patents and product launches, researcher employment from job postings, and the dates of policy changes.

Next step#

Compare the growth of reported R&D with the growth of R&D job postings for firms around a change in the generosity of relief.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
R&D tax incentives1#288111
tax incentives3#776134

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/rd-tax-incentives-and-relabeling.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). R&D tax incentives and the relabeling problem. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/rd-tax-incentives-and-relabeling

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-rd-tax-incentives-and-relabeling,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {R&D tax incentives and the relabeling problem},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/rd-tax-incentives-and-relabeling}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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