A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are...

One commonly mentioned rationale for public funding is its positive signaling effect, often called the “halo-effect”, to the private sector financial institutions about the quality of the firm. This is based on the market failure argument based on the existence of asymmetric information...

Not unlike elsewhere, the government in Finland has been keen to provide funding to Finnish firms, especially to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In this paper we review, in the light of the economic rationales for public efforts to finance SMEs, all of the government institutions...

The Finnish government, in addition to providing finance to SMEs, has established a number of support mechanisms that provide assistance to SMEs via free or subsidized business support services. In this paper, we review the public organisations providing business services, and the instruments...

We study the capital market implications of mandatory auditor choice. This regulatory intervention provides us with an instrument that can be used to examine the role of asymmetric information in the market for small business finance. We propose, in particular, a new exogenous measure of...

Despite the voluminous and growing literature on financial constraints, the origins of the constraints are hardly ever empirically analyzed. This paper offers such an analysis. We study, in particular, the empirical prevalence of adverse selection and moral hazard in capital markets using a...

This paper examines empirically how firm ownership structure affects its research- and development (R&D) intensity. To begin with, a principal-agent problem created by the separation of the management of a firm (the agent) and its ownership (the principal) is reviewed, and prior empirical...

There is plenty of evidence for market failures that motivate government intervention for innovation in general and research and development (R&D) in particular. R&D subsidies are a policy tool of major importance - both in theory and practice. The empirical evidence for the effectiveness of R&D...

This article first reviews the economic rationales for innovation policy. It then describes the Finnish innovation policy and policy making environment. The Finnish policy is evaluated from the point of view of fostering entrepreneurship. R&D subsidies, the main tool of Finnish innovation...

We use elections data in which a large number of ties in vote counts between candidates are resolved via a lottery to study the personal incumbency advantage. We benchmark non-experimental regression discontinuity design (RDD) estimates against the estimate produced by this experiment that takes...