According to Gibrat' Law of Proportionate Effect, the growth rate of a given firm is independent of its size at the beginning of the period examined. In contrast to the previous literature on the subject, this paper seeks to test the Law by taking account of both the entry process and the role...

The hypothesis underlined in this paper is that apart from infant mortality there is another relevant phenomenon taking place within new-born Small Business Enterprises (SBEs) in the period immediately after entry; namely that the smaller ones among them, having entered with a marked sub-optimal...

This study explicitly takes into account that the decision to enter into an external R&D relationship is related to an antecedent decision to carry out R&D. This calls for a methodological approach that, at the same time, permits the joint analysis of the determinants of the two decisions and...

Building on a standard policy evaluation literature mainly aimed at estimating the additional effect of subsidies on either firms' innovative expenditures or innovative outputs only, this paper tries to move one step further, combining the two (input and output) dimensions of innovation into a...

Previous empirical literature - mainly cross-sectional - has tested the demand-pull hypothesis and found that overall, evidence does not conflict with the idea that innovation may be driven by output. Using a balanced panel of 216 Italian manufacturing firms over the 1995-2000 period, and...

This paper examines the determinants of young innovative companies' (YICs) R&D activities taking into account the autoregressive nature of innovation. Using a large longitudinal dataset comprising Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 1990-2008, we find that previous R&D experience is a...

This paper explores the employment impact of innovation activity, taking into account both R&D expenditures and embodied technological change (ETC). We use a novel panel dataset covering 265 innovative Italian firms over the period 1998-2010. The main outcome from the proposed fixed effect...

This paper examines the determinants of young innovative companies' (YICs) R&D activities taking into account the autoregressive nature of innovation. Using a large longitudinal dataset comprising Spanish manufacturing firms over the period 1990-2008, we find that previous R&D experience is a...