With the sustained growth of high-tech industries, high-tech identification policy has become a focus of innovation policy studies. This paper has introduced two emerging concepts, additionality and signal effect, to better understand and evaluate the effect of high-tech identification policy. Originated in Europe, additionality was used to responding to the suspicion of government R&D funding legitimacy at first. Now, the central issue on additionality analysis framework is to determine whether government R&D funding has resulted in new innovative activities in the private sector, and to what extent. It is generally believed that additionality could be divided into input additionality, output additionality and behavioral additionality, this study has investigated input additionality and output additionality are used in.

Signal effect means that the government gives high-tech identification to some firms, which conveys quality information of the firms to potential investors in the market. The asymmetry of market information potential investors need the government to act as an intermediary role and send signal to the market. So, in this paper, we study whether signal effect changes the effect of the high-tech identification policy on firm innovation additionality.

In this study, we address sample selection bias by applying the propensity score matching approach. We solve the following key issues. First, does the incentives of high-tech identification policy influence firm innovation additionality? Second, how does the signal effect change the effect of the high-tech identification policy on firms′ additionality? Third, how does the ownership intensity change the effect? 

The study applies the empirical research paradigm based on the innovation data of the new three board stock companies of Hubei Province in 2015, 2016 and 2017, after controlling for sample selection bias, the results show that:

(1)On the whole, output additionality is positively related to high-tech identification policy, but such effects are not obvious in input additionality; Compared with substantive innovation, high-tech identification policy′s output additionality is more obvious in strategic innovation. 

(2)Heterogeneity exists in the regulatory effect of signal effect. Financial support system has a negative regulatory effect on the positive correlation between the input additionality and high-tech identification policy. Financial support system has a negative regulatory effect on the positive correlation between output additionality and high-tech identification policy. Equity circulation has a positive regulatory effect on the positive correlation between the output additionality and high-tech identification policy, while the effect for input additionality is negligible.

(3)Ownership concentration has a negative regulatory effect on positive correlation between the output additionality and high-tech identification policy, while the effect for input additionality is negligible. 

 high-tech enterprise identification policy, additionality effect, signal transmission, ownership concentration