This paper investigates the relationship between a firm's investment decision and its financial situation. We present a model of investment, where the cost of external finance is increasing in the debt ratio. The model is estimated using a panel of Norwegian manufacturing establishments for the...

Increased focus on shareholder returns, capital discipline and return on capital employed (RoACE) caused a slowdown in investment rates and production growth among international oil companies around the turn of the century. Focusing on supply side dynamics of the oil market, we explore a...

Supermarkets and high-value exports are currently gaining ground in the agri-food systems of many developing countries. While recent research has analyzed income effects in the small farm sector, impacts on farming efficiency have hardly been studied. Using a survey of Kenyan vegetable growers...

A steep decline in coffee prices at the producer level led to considerable pressure for farmers in Costa Rica and producer countries all over the world. One possible reaction was moving to specialty markets, where price pressure was perceived to be lower. We use original survey data from 2002/03...

Regulatory authorities in the European electricity sector use benchmarking techniques to determine the cost-efficient production level for an incentive regulation of distribution system operators (DSOs). With nearly 900 DSOs operating in the German electricity sector, of which 200 subject to...

Business innovation is an important driver of productivity growth. In this paper, I assess the importance of R&D and ICT investment for firm performance in the manufacturing and service industries. Explicitly, I use an extended version of the CDM model that treats ICT together with R&D as the...

Foster et al. (2001) outline a framework that is commonly used to identify the contribution from firm turnover to aggregate productivity growth. The framework is not derived from economic theory and it implies that productivity levels determine the contribution from reallocation and firm...

In the Norwegian national accounts, as in many other countries, it is quite common to use information on depreciation rates and profiles based on studies from the US, Canada and the Netherlands due to a lack of national studies. We present new results based on a survey of Norwegian firms...

We analyse all the major sources of direct and indirect R&D subsidies in Norway in the period 2002- 2013 and compare their effects on individual firms’ performance. Firms that received support are matched with a control group of firms that did not receive support using a combination of...

Some well-known correlations between R&D and performance are given a somewhat new interpretation in this paper. I present an alternative model of knowledge accumulation, with some interesting and desirable properties. Perhaps the most attractive property is that it provides a simple and less...