The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent...

Excess entry – or the high failure rate of market-entry decisions – is often attributed to overconfidence exhibited by entreprene urs. We show analytically that whereas excess entry is an inevitable consequence of imperfect assessments of entrepreneurial skill, it does not imply...

We develop a two-sided matching model to analyze collaboration between heterogeneous academics and firms. We predict a positive assortative matching in terms of both scientific ability and affinity for type of research, but negative assortative in terms of ability on one side and affinity in the...

This paper characterizes the innovation strategy of manufacturing firms and examines the relation between the innovation strategy and important industry-, firm- and innovation-specific characteristics using Belgian data from the Eurostat Community Innovation Survey. In addition to important size...

We present a model of conglomeration motivated by technology synergies and strategic reductions in variable costs in the face of competitive pressures. The resulting firm integration is neither horizontal nor vertical but rather congeneric integration of firms in related industries. We...

External knowledge is an important input for the innovation process of firms. Increasingly, this knowledge is likely to originate from outside of their national borders. This explains the preoccupation of policymakers with stimulating local technology transfers coming from international firms....

In this paper we carefully link knowledge flows to and from a firm’s innovation process with this firm’s investment decisions. Three types of investments are considered: investments in applied research, investments in basic research, and investments in intellectual property protection. Only...

We use network and correspondence analysis to describe the composition of the research networks in the European BRITE--EURAM program. Our main finding is that 27\% of the participants in this program fall into one of two sets of highly ``interconnected'' institutions --one centered around large...

This paper provides some first empirical evidence on the relationship between R&D spillovers and R&D cooperation. The results suggest disentangling different aspects of know-how flows. Firms which rate incoming spillovers more importantly and who can limit outgoing spillovers by a more effective...

This paper argues that a large technological innovation may lead to a merger wave by inducing entrepreneurs to seek funds from technologically knowledgeable firms -experts. When a large technological innovation occurs, the ability of non-experts (banks) to discriminate between good and bad...