Executive summary Ten years ago the Directorate General Enterprise of the European Commission established the Observatory of European SMEs (hereafter referred to as u0093the Observatoryu0094) to respond to a perceived information gap concerning SMEs in Europe. The Observatory considers SMEs to...

We draw on a recent survey of European companies to differentiate between alternative modes of international outsourcing as possible determinants of market, cost and knowledge-related aspects of the competitiveness of firms. We find that internalized modes are often superior to outside options,...

This paper looks at how well Finland performs in high growth entrepreneurship and uses data from the Global Entrepreneurship monitor to benchmark Finland against other European countries. It is found that Finland's prevalence rate of high growth entrepreneurial activity lags significantly behind...

This paper investigates how the ownership and the procedure for the selection of firms operating in the local public transport sector affect their productivity. In order to compare different institutional regimes, we carry out a comparative analysis of 72 companies operating in large European...

This paper assesses UK innovation policy impact on a large, population weighted, sample of both service and manufacturing SMEs. By focussing on self-reported innovation the study achieves a wider coverage of the effects of SME innovation policy than possible with more traditional indicators....

Based on the empirical firm growth literature and on heterogeneous (microeconomic) adjustment models, this paper empirically investigates the impact of European industry fluctuations and domestic business cycles on the growth performance of European firms. Since the implementation of the Single...

The EU has been promoting unbundling of the transmission grid from other stages of the electricity supply chain with the aim of fostering competition in the upstream stage of electricity generation. At presence, ownership unbundling is the predominant form of unbundling in Europe. However, the...

This paper examines the employment effects of acquisitions for acquired European firms taking non-random selection of acquisition targets explicitly into account. Following the empirical firm growth literature and theories put forward in the mergers and acquisition (M&A) literature we control...

Based on the empirical firm growth literature and on heterogeneous (microeconomic) adjustment models, this paper empirically investigates the impact of European industry fluctuations and domestic business cycles on the growth performance of European firms. Since the implementation of the Single...

This note proposes the continuous treatment approach as a valuable alternative to propensity score matching for evaluating economic effects of merger and acquisitions (M&A). This framework allows to consider the variation in treatment intensities explicitly, and it does not call for the...