This chapter reviews the empirical literature on the determination of firms’ and industries’ innovative activity and performance, highlighting the questions addressed, the approaches adopted, impediments to progress in the field, and research opportunities. We review the...

The Framework programmes created by the European Union are the main financial tools used to support cooperative R&D activities in the EU. Unlike previous empirical studies, this paper suggests that their impact on firms’ competitiveness is significant. We analyze industry-oriented research...

In this study we analyze how CEO risk incentives affect the efficiency of research and development (R&D) investments. We examine a sample of 843 cases in which firms increase their R&D investments by an economically significant amount over the period of 1995–2006. We find that firms with...

Determining what factors influence firm performance constitutes an essential issue in both the management and the family firm research fields. This article, building on the resource-based view perspective, develops a mediation model that involves a unique intervening mechanism, namely,...

We employ World Bank Enterprise Survey data collected in 2006–2010 for 21,852 firms from 31 Latin American and Caribbean countries to investigate determinants of the adoption of International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification, the relation between ISO certification and firm...

How effective are government policy attempts to boost firm exports in the short-run? We answer this question by conducting a review of 33 studies from 26 countries around the world, and provide nine findings. Export boosting policies are defined as a group of public policies that aim to increase...

The unique natural experiment of the fall of the iron curtain led to large institutional and governance differences across countries. This allows us to observe the evolution of ownership and control after an initial shock. We utilize this cross-time/cross-country variation in institutions and...

An extensive empirical literature in strategy and finance studies the performance implications of corporate diversification. Two core debates in the literature concern the existence of a diversification discount and the relative importance of industry relatedness and market structure for the...

We examine the performance and compensation implications of firms' decisions to combine the roles of CEO and board chairman (duality). We document that firms that split the CEO and chairman positions due to investor pressure have significantly lower announcement returns and subsequent...

Demographic shifts are altering job markets in developed countries. A steady increase in the average age of employees and a decline in the number of young, qualified workers have intensified the war for talent, resulting in highly competitive and dynamic job markets. Using resource dependence...