Subsidies to business sector R&D can be given either as R&D tax credits or direct grants. Majority of the OECD countries use both policy tools, Finland has used only grants. The Finnish support system has been functioning relatively well, but it has been argued that it does not support well...

In this paper we study a horizontally differentiated market for financial in-termediation and develop a simple explanation for concentration in the financial intermediation industry. We show that under asymmetric information, if the demand for funds is not perfectly elastic, the heterogeneity of...

In many industries, including telecommunications, a government decision on a standard is needed for the society to reap the benefits from the diffusion of new goods. Delays induced by regulatory bodies either in standard choice or its implementation can be extremely costly. I study...

Mobile phones are increasingly used as a gateway to the Internet. The take-up of mobile phone-enabled Internet services was, however, initially slower than expected, at least in Europe. We estimate non-parametrically the price elasticities of demand for first-generation wireless services using...

This paper provides evidence that capital market imperfections hold back innovation and growth, and that public policy can complement capital markets. We deliver the evidence by studying the effects of government funding on the behavior of SMEs in Finland. By adapting the methodology recently...

We study empirically the determinants of deposit supply using bank level data from local Finnish cooperative banks. Of special interest is the effect of bank branch density on deposit supply. Our main finding is that holding other things constant, the denser the branch network, the lower the...

In a model of bank lending characterized by asymmetric information, we show that banks may misuse the availability of an interim monitoring technology to soften price competition, even though the borrowers face no moral hazard problem. The interim monitoring technology can also be used to...

Many new technologies exhibit clear generational changes. The empirical literature on technology diffusion traditionally analyses the spread of new technologies generically. We use data from the mobile phone industry, where first-generation (1G) and second-generation technologies (2G) can be...

Economic interest in innovation policy largely arises from the fundamental importance of innovation to social welfare and from well-known inefficiencies in innovation in a competitive market environment. As a result, a wide variety of public innovation policies are used in practice. This report...

We study the effects of investor protection on the availability of external finance, entrepreneurship, and creation of new firms in an equilibrium search model of private capital markets. In addition to search frictions, we examine contract frictions, specifically interim and ex post moral...