Under the influence of the Lisbon Strategy (2000), the Barcelona ‘3%’ objective (2002) for more investment in research in Europe and the renewed Lisbon Strategy (2005), increased attention has been paid by both policy-makers and researchers to the origin of the EU-US R&D investment gap,...

This paper examines whether there are differences in private R&D investment performance between the EU and the US and, if so, why. The study is based on data from the 2008 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The investigation assesses the effects of several very distinct factors that can...

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...

This paper examines the sources of Europe's lagging business R&D performance relative to the US, particularly the role played by missing young leading innovators in high technology intensive sectors in Europe. It investigates through econometric analysis differences in the rates of return to R&D...

We use the recent financial crisis to investigate financing constraints of private small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Belgium. We hypothesize that SMEs with a large proportion of long-term debt maturing at the start of the crisis had difficulties to renew their loans due to the...

This study examines the impact of financial flexibility on the investment and performance of East Asian firms over the period 1994–2009. We employ a sample of 1,068 firms and place particular emphasis on the periods of the Asian crisis (1997–1998) and the recent credit crisis (2007–2009)....

A recent literature has criticised the sensitivity of a firm's investment to its own cash flow as an adequate measure of financing constraints. In this paper we develop a new method to detect the presence of financing constraints at firm level. We consider a structural dynamic model of...

This paper investigates the interactions between preemptive competition and leverage in a duopoly market. We investigate both a case in which the firms have optimal financial structures, and a case in which financing constraints require firms to finance their investments by debt. Our findings...

We explore whether financial development reduces external investment financing constraints for firms. Within-country provincial measures of financial development are linked to investment usingdata from the Vietnamese enterprise survey (VES). We focus on three main aspects of...

This paper investigates the interactions between preemptive competition and leverage. We find that the second mover always leaves the duopoly market before the first mover, although the leader may exit before the followerfs entry. We also see the leverage effects of debt financing increasing...