During the last 20 years, R&D and innovation activities in the service sector have clearly increased. Especially business services are believed to be one of the main drivers of technical changes and economic progress. Looking at the labour indices calculated over the period from 1982 to 1996 one...

During the last 20 years, R&D and innovation activities in the service sector have clearly increased. Especially business services are believed to be one of the main drivers of technical changes and economic progress. Looking at the labour indices calculated over the period from 1982 to 1996 one...

Skills shortage has become a key policy issue in highly developed and innovation-oriented economies, with non-negligible consequences on firms' innovation activities. We investigate the effect of skills shortage on firms' innovation openness, which is considered to be one of the key drivers of...

The stimulation of co-operations and networks has become very popular in R&D policies in recent years. This study examines the development and the impact of publicly funded R&D consortia in Germany. The paper describes the history of R&D funding in Germany with a focus on the development of...

Credit ratings are commonly used by lenders to assess the default risk, because every credit is connected with a possible loss. If the probability of a default is above a certain threshold, a credit will not be provided. The purpose of this paper is to test whether credit ratings contribute...

This study focuses on the impact of innovation policies and R&D collaboration in Germany and Finland. We consider collaboration and subsidies as heterogeneous treatments, and perform an econometric matching to analyze patent activity at the firm level. In general, we find that collaboration has...

Successful innovative activity is a major contribution to the intangible capital of firms. Although its importance is generally acknowledged, the contribution to companies? profits is a priori unclear. We present the results of an empirical study on the effects of the patent stock on...

This paper analyzes the effects of public R&D funding on R&D expenditure and patenting behavior of German firms. The main focus is the direct impact of subsidies on R&D and the indirect effect on innovation output measured by patent applications. We distinguish the productivity of purely...

The present paper first discusses theoretically the different incentives of manager- versus owner-controlled firms for investment into innovative activity. In addition, the role of debt financing is analyzed. Subsequently the results from an empirical study on the determinants of innovative...