We investigate the impact of industry engagement on the direction of academic science. We apply the framework of the research agenda to assess to which extent industry engagement shifts the costs and benefits of pursuing and adopting research topics. Our empirical analysis, based on a survey of...

Personality drives human decision-making. Research on corporate research and development (R&D), however, typically considers strategic decision-making to be independent of the decisionmaker’s personality traits. This study investigates the impact of CEO personality on scaling activities in...

We explore which start-ups win in public procurement. Most notably, our analysis presents significant differences between firms applying for tenders with and without functional criteria. First, we use representative telephone survey data to estimate public procurement applicant and winner shares...

Public procurement offers sizable market opportunities for young firms. We investigate the firm- and founder-level characteristics determining young firms' decision to apply for public tenders, as well as the procurers' selection of an awardee. We distinguish between observable and unobservable...

A major source of research funding for university professors are competitive research grants. With focus on Luxembourg, we present results from a difference-in-difference analysis which show that research grants by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the central research funding agency...

We discuss the impacts of the Russian invasion on Ukrainian science. Using newly collected data, we show that the war has already had significant effects on science in Ukraine: research papers produced by Ukrainian scientists declined by about 10%, approximately 5% of the most prolific...

This paper estimates the effect of heterogeneous university funding stemming from the German Excellence Initiative on a regional firm’s probability to innovate by using a multi-valued two-way fixed effects difference-in-differences model. The estimations show that funding an additional...

Among available policy levers to boost innovation, investment in applied research organisations has received little empirical attention. In this paper, we analyse the case of the Fraunhofer Society, the largest public applied research organization in Germany. We analyse whether project...

In response to strong revenue and income losses that a large share of the self-employed faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the German federal government introduced a €50bn emergency aid program. Based on real-time online-survey data comprising more than 20,000 observations, we analyze the...

Start-up subsidies play an important role in supporting start-up innovation and performance. However, what characteristics help and hinder start-ups to seek start-up subsidies remains unclear. We study whether and how founder personality, as captured by the big five personality traits and...