Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP) has an important role in the sudden transition that our economies require to face up to today's grand challenges (climate change, sustainable development goals). In the European Union (EU), Cohesion policy funds are one of the main financing instruments to...

Policy-makers and scholars often assume that a higher incidence of high-growth firms (HGFs) is synonymous with vibrant regional economic dynamics, and that HGF shares are persistent over time as Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) have slowly-changing features. In this paper we test these...

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...

Export boosting is a policy agenda in developed and developing countries. Previous work has found that a small number of Superstars contribute disproportionally to the economy's overall exports. Differently from Superstars, this study is the first to define high growth exporters (HGXs), provide...

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,...

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...