This paper explores the existence and importance of financing constraints for R&D investments in large EU and US manufacturing companies over the 2000 – 2007 period. The main results obtained by estimating error-correction equations suggest that the sensitivity of R&D investments to cash flow...

This paper aims to assess the impact of both geographic and industrial diversification of economic activities on the productivity performance of large European R&D Multinational Enterprises (MNEs). Based on the worldwide subsidiaries of these firms, we measure the performance of the firms...

Innovation in the European Union remains weak according to a number of key ‘input’ indicators, especially R&D investment by the business sector, and there are relatively few signs of progress. From a firm-level perspective, Europe’s innovation gap relative to the US results from an...

Based on an original data set with information of a representative portfolio of among the largest 304 R&D investing companies over the 2003-2006 period, the overall analysis, except in a few cases, gives some robust evidence of a positive relationship between top R&D-investing companies and...

Based on an original and recent sample representative of the largest R&D corporations in the EU, this paper aims at investigating in a quantitative way the main factors explaining: (i) the decision of firms to increase their R&D investment effort in the near future; (ii) the main drivers...

This study investigates how corporate R&D evolves in the light of the contemporary economic crisis. We investigate what empirical evidence from past downturns suggests, discuss the relevant literature and perform an empirical analysis of recent business survey data (collected during 2009). We...