1,721,307 research outputs found
Inventor mobility and productivity in Italian regions
No full textThis paper describes the interregional and international mobility of inventors in Italy and estimates its impact on total factor productivity (TFP) at the regional level for the period 1996–2011. A new database of mobile inventors is constructed and, using a set of geographically based instruments to address endogeneity, it shows that inventor in- and outflows affect regional TFP growth. Moreover, the positive effects of the inventors’ mobility (inflow) between different applicants take more time to materialize (relative to movements within the same company). Finally, the negative effects of inventor outflows are mainly driven by mobility between applicants.status: Published onlin
Essays on the productivity effects of research, development and design activities.
No full textstatus: Publishe
Disclosure and financial reporting regulation.
No full textRecent events have spurred the debate about financial reporting and disclosure regulations around the world. International financial crises and corporate scandals brought ever greater reporting and disclosure requirements. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, the Enron debacle in the U.S., and the recent credit market crisis are only a few examples. Only in Europe millions of firms are forced to disclose financial information each year. Despite the claimed importance of corporate transparency, there is limited research on the costs and benefits of financial reporting and disclosure regulation. Most of the literature focuses on voluntary disclosures of financial information of U.S. publicly listed firms. While these studies provide important insights into the private benefits associated with voluntary reporting, the costs and benefits of mandatory information disclosures are still unknown, particularly for non-listed privately held firms. The proposed research aims to close these gaps in the literature. Drawing on insights from theoretical and empirical studies from accounting, economics, finance and law, we will examine firm-specific as well as macro-level costs and benefits of private firms’ forced disclosure activities (e.g. credit ratings, productivity). Our comprehensive empirical analysis of these questions should prove useful to researchers, as well as standard setters, policy makers, and regulators, debating the economic consequences of past and future regulatory choices.status: Publishe
Nieuwe Perspectieven op de Financiering van R&D en Innovatie
No full textThe overall objective of the dissertation is to open new perspectives on the financing of R&D and innovation. In particular, this thesis examines the role of external debt finance for funding investments in R&D in the bank-based continental European country Belgium and how this relates to the receipt of public support. Previous literature has largely focused on investigating the extent to which R&D performing companies rely on their internal financial resources and the effectiveness of various types of public support programs such as the assignment of R&D subsidies or tax credits. However, academic research on the use of external debt finance for R&D and innovation remains scarce. The aim of this dissertation is to contribute to this underexplored research area. More specifically, the thesis starts with an analysis on what types of companies actually make use of debt finance for their internal R&D activities. Next, the real impact of the 2008-2009 financial crisis on R&D activities at the firm level is examined, an occurrence that was characterized by severe credit tightening. The last part of the dissertation investigates the link between the receipt of selective public support for R&D and the access to bank financing. In particular, the impact of an R&D grant receipt stemming from a reputable government agency on an R&D performing company’s cost of debt is examined.status: Publishe
Essays on the economics of evaluation: public policy and corporate strategies in innovation.
Full text linkstatus: Publishe
Are Local Milieus the Key to Innovation Performance?
Full text linkThis study investigates how local milieus foster innovation success in firms. We complement the common practice of linking firm performance indicators to regional characteristics with survey evidence on the perceived importance of locational factors. While the former approach assumes that location characteristics affect all firms in the same way, the survey allows us to model how firms judge the attractiveness of locations using a heterogeneous set of criteria. It turns out that the availability of highly skilled labor and the proximity to suppliers matter for firms' innovation performance. Interestingly, location factors obtained from the survey provide a more accurate explanation of how local milieus facilitate innovation. --Innovation performance,R&D,location factors,Flanders
Who does (not) want to pay for innovation - the financing gap story revisited.
No full textThis doctoral dissertation focuses on measuring financial constraints for industrial R&D and the identification of firms that face such constraints and hence are potentially not able to pursue their R&D at the desired level. The identification of potentially constrained firms is crucialfor the design of efficient innovation policy schemes. The thesis contributed to previous empirical studies on incentive and financing problemsfor private sector investment in innovation projects. Themain contribution is basically twofold. First, the thesis adds to previous research on that topic by taking into account the heterogeneity of R&D investments. Second, it contributes to earlier research in terms of methodology. In particular, it is attempted to overcome limitations of previous measuring approaches by introducing direct measures of credit market access andeven a direct measures for the financial constraint itself.The first part presents a test for financial constraints on R&D investment and how they differ from capital investment. To identify constraintsin the access to external capital, a credit rating index is employed. The models show that internal constraints, measured by mark-ups, are moredecisive for R&D than for capital investment. For external constraints,a monotonic relationshipbetween the level of constriction and firm size for both types of investment is found. Thus, external constraints turn out to be more binding with decreasing firm size. The second part analyzes financial constraintson R&D, where it is accounted for heterogeneity among investments whichhas been neglected in previous literature. According to economic theory, investments should be distinguished by their degree of uncertainty, e.g. routine R&D versuscutting-edge R&D. Financial constraints should be more binding for cutting-edge R&D than for routine R&D. Using panel data it can be shown thatR&D spending of firms devoting a significant fraction of R&D to cutting-edge projects is curtailed by credit constraints while routine R&Dinvestments are not. This has important policy implications with respect to the distribution of R&D subsidies in the economy. The third part compartmentalizes R&D activities in its components, R and D as these activities do not only differ in their nature, but also to a large extenttake place sequentially. The results show that R investment is more sensitive to the firms operating liquidity than D indicating that firms have to rely even more on internal funds for financing their research compared to development activities. Moreover, it is found that (basic) research subsidy recipients investment is less sensitive to internal liquidity. The fourth part presents an entirely different approach to the identification of financing constraints. In particular, a survey-based measure of financing constraints is derived from a test that comes closer to the 'ideal experiment' for identifying financing constraints as suggested by Hall (2008). This article furthermore introduces the concept of innovation capability into the context of financing constraints. There are two possible theories on how innovative capabilities affect financingconstraints. First, as innovation capabilities are necessary to do innovation, firms with high capabilities should be able to attract funds easier because of the higher expected success of their projects. On the other hand, it can be argued that investors - although they might be aware of the fact that skill is an important success factor of R&D - do not value such skills. In terms of economic theory this means that uncertaintyabout the outcome of innovation projects outweighs the information on skills. The results from this paper suggest the second alternative. Although one could expect firms with high innovative capacity to be less constrained as they should be able to better convince banks and investors because of all the evidence that skill increase success of innovation projects, they are actually more likely to be constrained. This may be due to the increased demand for financing one the one hand, but also due to the fact that banks and investors may still value 'tangible collateral capital' more than something intangible as innovationcapabilities. The conclusions that can be drawn from this dissertation have important implications for innovation policy particularly for economies in which bank financing plays such a crucial role as it does for example in Germany. Firms in Anglo-Saxon 'market-based' economies with developed and liquid stock markets generally rely to a lower extend on bankfinancing compared to firms in 'banking-dominated' financial systems that can be found in continental Europe.Given that even independently of any financial crisis, economic theory and empirical evidence stress the relevance of financing constraints, the problem presumably deteriorates as the current financial crisis will require banks to conduct an even more detailed risk assessment in the future. Systematic risk assessment techniques as within the implementation of the New Basel Capital Accord affect financing of innovation, in particular the screening of innovative firms. As intangible investments like R&D are not reflected in the firms' balance sheets, financial statement-based estimations of firm value and creditworthiness (internal, but alsoexternal ratings) penalize firms that invest in R&D at least in the short-run. A starting point for future research is thus for example how investments in intangible assets such as the outcome from R&D projects, affect banks' risk evaluation and the decision to provide credit. In addition, the rigorous evaluation of existing policy schemes addressing financial constraints appears to be a desirable task for (European) innovationpolicy. Despite the suggested need for government intervention to support financially constrained firms, it should be noted that also governments are not immune against information asymmetry problems either. With respect to project selection within support programmes, it may be that selection committees do not pick those proposals that promise highest social returns or those that are least likely to attract financing at privatesector sources, but those that seem the most feasible or most likely toyield successful outcomes in the not too distant future. As highly basic research projects may score low on selection criteria like 'feasibility' or 'expected economic value', government agents may behave similar as private lenders when it comes to project selection. Hence, itmay happen that very challenging research projects are not awarded a subsidy. For the pattern of innovation project grants by the Flemishgovernment, there is slight evidence that basic research projects are indeed rejected more frequently.For future European innovation policy, it will therefore remain a challenge to find an optimal policy path that balances targeted subsidy and incentive programmes as well as initiatives that pave the way for market based solutions. The latter may even involve the implementation of fundamental ideas such as legal reforms with respect to accounting policies to better position R&D investments vis-à-vis traditional capital investments.status: Publishe
Essays on the role of patent law and science policy for the production and commercialization of knowledge.
No full textstatus: Publishe
Empirical essays on the economics of relationship banking.
No full textThis thesis provides evidence on the role of bank relationships for firms in changing economic environments. It does so by looking at how banking market conditions, financial shocks to banks and regulation affect the firm-bank relationship, outside financing opportunities and the financial and economic wellbeing of firms. It makes extensive use of firm-level micro data from Germany. Specifically, each of the contained chapters employ data from the Mannheim Enterprise Panel (MUP) by the Center for European Economic Research (ZEW) which covers almost the entire population of German private firms and for them a large number of firm-level information, among it the firm-bank relationships of firms. Chapter 1 studies the large banking market consolidation wave that has occurred in Germany. Results show that bank mergers lead to increased termination of bank-relationships for firm customers of the target bank. The relationship-deteriorating effects are shown to be most severe if the bank and particularly if the target bank is in distress and also if the firm is in distress but not if both are, pointing towards bank strategies of reducing additional losses (“evergreening”). Furthermore, I show that the relationship-terminating effects can be alleviated by the relationship-orientation of banks, but only as long as capacity constraints are not binding (i.e. as long as banks are not too small). Chapter 2 investigates how bank distress events impact a firm’s probability of default (PD), as perceived by an independent credit rating agency. The essay aims to identify a “bank risk channel” to firms which excludes demand related factors affecting firm risk such as a firm’s industry, the institutional environment or a firm’s idiosyncratic risk. We find that bank distress on average increases firms’ PD by 12%, reduces their recommended trade credit volume by about 8% and results in an about 4% reduction in sales. Furthermore we find that while the distress of transaction banks increases the PDs of high-risk firms, relationship banks seem to shield firms with above-median riskiness from the shock. Yet, within systemic crises, relationship banks cannot keep up the strategy to safeguard bad customer firms. In contrast to the first two chapters, Chapter 3 does not look at events on the level of banks but looks at a changing regulatory environment for financial reporting of firms. We investigate firms’ ability to enter new bank relationships depending on whether or not the firm discloses financial information to the public. We find that firms that provide less information have less bank relationships thereafter and this is primarily driven by their reduced ability to enter new bank relationships. This hold in particular for relationships with transaction banks that usually rely more on codifiable information than relationship banks do.status: Publishe
- …
