Understanding causal relationships among key economic variables is crucial for policy makers, who wish to e.g. stimulate private R&D growth. To this end, we applied a technique recently imported from the Machine Learning community (Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) identified using...

Although diversity between team members may bring benefits of new perspectives, nevertheless, what holds a team together is similarity. We theorise that diversity in one dimension is traded off against diversity in another. Our analysis of collaborative research teams that received FP7 funding...

Do firms in the same sector converge towards the same R&D intensities? Previous research has often assumed this to be true. A closer examination, using microdata from the EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard for the years 2000-2015, shows a large amount of heterogeneity in R&D intensities...

Recent empirical studies have investigated the territorial impact of Europe’s research policies, in particular the contribution of the European Framework Programmes to the integration of a European Research Area. This paper deepens the analysis on the integration and participation of...

Many industrialized countries in Europe and North America have experienced a steady decline in the manufacturing sector over the last few decades. Amid growing concerns that outsourcing and offshoring have destabilized European economies, policymakers have suggested that a large manufacturing...

We analyse survey data to investigate the main barriers to European cross-border e-commerce. We investigate the determinants of selling online, as well as the frequency and determinants of cross-border e-commerce, and the role of barriers. Large firms, which are part of a group, are more likely...

The issue of technological unemployment receives perennial popular attention. Although there are previous empirical investigations that have focused on the relationship between innovation and employment, the originality of our approach lies in our choice of method. We focus on four 2-digit...

We survey the phenomenon of the growth of firms drawing on literature from economics, management, and sociology. We begin with a review of empirical 'stylised facts' before discussing theoretical contributions. Firm growth is characterized by a predominant stochastic element, making it difficult...

We apply a panel vector autoregression model to a firm-level longitudinal database to observe the co-evolution of sales growth, employment growth, profits growth and growth of R&D expenditure. Contrary to expectations, profit growth seems to have little detectable effect on R&D investment....

This paper introduces a little known category of estimators - Linear Non-Gaussian vector autoregression models that are acyclic or cyclic - imported from the machine learning literature, to revisit a well-known debate. Does exporting increase firm productivity? Or is it only more productive...