This paper draws on a sample of innovative Catalan firms to identify the effects of the two main sources of innovation —internal R&D and external R&D acquisition— on productivity in the manufacturing and service industries. The sample comprises a 3,267 firms from the CIS-4 for the years...

Some studies using either objective or subjective indicators, find that self-employed individuals are less likely to be or to report being skill-mismatched in comparison with salaried employees. The aim of this paper is to analyze the impact of the transition from salaried employment to...

The effect of the COVID shock on European economies has been severe and also unequal, with some firms being affected much more strongly than others. To improve the effectiveness of policy interventions, policymakers need to understand which types of vulnerable firms have been suddenly pushed...

We analyse how the COVID-19 crisis impacted firms' employment levels and digitalisation efforts differently depending on their pre-crisis productivity, digitalisation and growth performance. We match the EIB Investment Survey with firm-level financial statements from the ORBIS database for 27 EU...

The COVID-19 shock hit firms hard, on average, but how did it hit in the distribution of firms, differently between the high-growth superstars and the firms that were already struggling to survive? This paper implements graphical techniques and quantile regression to analyse the effect of the...

This paper contributes to a fast-growing literature on the impact of COVID-19 on the business economy, by focusing on how a particular group of firms - High-Growth Enterprises (HGEs) have been affected by COVID-19 across several dimensions, such as investment expectations, investment priorities,...

Our empirical literature review shows that little is known about how firm performance changes with age, presumably because of the paucity of data on firm age. For Spanish manufacturing firms, we analyse the firm performance related to firm age between 1998 and 2006. We find evidence that firms...

Inter-firm competition has received much attention in the theoretical literature, but recent empirical work suggests that the growth rates of rival firms are uncorrelated, and that firm growth can be taken as an essentially independent process. We begin by investigating the correlations of the...