THE ROLE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PARKS IN THE GROWTH OF SALES OF PORTUGUESE FIRMS

The role of science and technology parks (STPs) in economic development, and in particular in the growth of the firms, has received considerable attention from government policies in different countries. However, there is no consensus in the literature on whether the location in these parks has positive effects on firms' sales growth. This paper aims to extend the discussion on the effects of STPs by providing new empirical evidence. With this purpose, we use a sample of 553 Portuguese companies located in these infrastructures and a control sample of the same size. We use the Propensity Score Matching Procedure to match the samples and the analysis is carried out by the Generalized Method of Moments in dynamic panel data. The empirical analysis does not prove any statistically significant effect of the location of the firms in science and technology parks on their growth in sales.