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In the research & development (R&D) and innovation management literature, the question of whether or not to perform research in the private sector is always a pertinent one. Several studies have used market value to measure its association with a firm’s R&D performance. Nevertheless, in Europe there have been considerably less studies as compared to the USA because the analysis is complicated by data issues and different country-specific laws. The purpose of this paper is to further advance this field of research. The study provides insights into the strategic decision behind conducting R&D.

The econometric analysis is based on a unique panel data set of 133 companies in 13 European countries which is collected from the Bloomberg database covering the time period from 2002 to 2012.

The empirical findings are as follows: there is weak evidence in support of the hypothesis that R&D expenditure positively affects the firm’s market value, a fact which is confirmed by other published works; there is weak evidence that economic events can disrupt the connection of R&D programs with the market value of firms; and for a highly controversial topic in the literature, data suggest that small firms are rather favoured more from R&D expenditure than large firms.

The current study expands the discussion regarding the effect of R&D on the market value of firms via empirical evidence, within the specific environment of the European financial crisis. Future managerial, informed-based, decisions can be drawn on the present results.

The aim of this paper is to assess the effects of traditional inputs and firms' R&D capital on labour productivity growth.

The study measures the effects of the traditional inputs on firms' productivity growth, through four procedures: OLS in first differences, within group, GMM in first differences and GMM system.

Whatever the specification considered, the more efficient estimates obtained from the GMM system show a similar effect of the firm's R&D stock upon its labour productivity performance.

The results suggest that physical capital plays a more prominent role for European firms than for US ones, while employees are more productive in the USA.

By presenting some empirical evidence on the effects of R&D on labour productivity, at the firm level, the present study makes two main contributions to the existing literature. First, a unique firm‐level database for European and US firms is used. It is self evident that firms in these countries operate in different economic and institutional settings; as a consequence the results identify some robust common effects concerning the two areas considered (the USA versus Europe) at the micro level. Second, service and manufacturing sectors are merged.

Agency theory postulates that research and development (R&D) investments are subject to managerial discretion and thus may not enhance firm value as expected. The inconclusive empirical findings in the literature is a testament of that. This paper aims to investigate the interplay between board gender diversity (i.e. women on boards) and value relevance of firms’ effort to innovate as indicated by firms’ R&D investments.

Through a sample of 1,626 US-listed firms from the period 2004 to 2019, the authors examine whether board gender diversity promotes or hampers value relevance of firms’ efforts to innovate. The authors use ordinary least squares as the baseline model and address potential endogeneity through instrumental variable two-stage least square, and selection bias through Heckman selection model. Finally, the authors use the financial crisis of 2008 as a natural experiment to investigate the effect of board gender diversity during the crisis period.

The results show that board gender diversity positively moderates the relation between R&D and firm value. In times of financial crisis, R&D does not destroy firm value in firms with gender diverse board. The results are robust to measurement error, endogeneity issue, particularly simultaneity and selection bias.

The findings in this study have several practical implications. Firms that invest heavily in R&D should be mindful of gender diversity in their board recruitment strategies to enhance innovation outputs and firm value. Current and potential investors (i.e. shareholders) should take into consideration board gender diversity in their investment decision-making processes as the results show that gender diverse boards promote more effective governance, which, in turn, leads to better alignment of R&D investments with shareholder value. Regulators aiming to improve corporate governance policies should encourage gender diversity on the boards. The results align with global initiatives such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly Goal 5 on gender equality. Policymakers may use the findings in this study to advocate for more gender diverse governance structures within corporations.

This study investigates the role gender diverse boards play in creating value from firms’ R&D activities.

In this chapter, we analyzed the effects of internationalization on innovation, productivity, and firm performance among multinational pharmaceutical companies as representatives of a global knowledge-based industry. The empirical analysis used multiple stepwise regressions based on a sample of 149 firms headquartered in Europe and the US. The results indicate that innovation outcomes are positively correlated to the number of foreign subsidiaries (scope internationalization), whereas surprisingly, formal research and development (R&D) does not seem to directly influence innovation. This suggests that the firms benefit from local overseas subsidiaries to create and implement new innovative offerings. The number of foreign subsidiaries has a U-shaped relationship to patent productivity suggesting that firms can gain advantages by locating cost-intensive activities in low-cost countries and critical tasks in advanced market locations. Firm performance has a U-shaped relationship to sales abroad (scale internationalization) and the relationship is further enhanced by a high focus on R&D. This suggests that sales abroad enable scale economies, where R&D improves quality and relevance of products and thereby boosts performance. Finally, to validate the findings we conducted two semi-structured interviews with representative industry experts and gained further insights for an extended interpretation of results.

Efficiency and productivity has always being a key issue in economic science. The analysis of the impact of research and development (R&D) has been extensively studied in industries and countries of more or less aggregated level. This chapter aims to investigate the impact of corporate R&D in performance of low-tech industries, medium-tech, and high-tech in OECD countries.

This chapter aims to answer the questions: Is the impact of R&D significant for all types of industries? If so, what are the differences and the magnitude of these effects in each of these types of industries?

To this end, an unbalanced data set from 2000 to 2011 was collected for the main countries of Europe and the United States concerning low-, medium-, and high-tech to analyze the impact of the magnitude of corporate R&D and capital accumulation on productivity of these industries. The productivity of industries was measured by stochastic parametric frontier functions, in order to measure the efficiency of R&D and accumulation of capital on labor productivity.

The main results highlight the impact of corporate R&D on productivity of high-tech industries, but for other industries those relations are not clear. However, capital accumulation became crucial on low technology to improve their performance. These results, although needing to include a more extensive data set of industries across countries, refer the need for policy and decision makers to allocate public funds for R&D in high-tech industries, while the investment in capital seems crucial, particularly in low-tech industries to improve the productivity.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether the effect of innovation subsidies on firms' R&D investment varies depending on whether the firm is suffering from financial constraints.

To address this analysis, the authors provide a theoretical model and test their hypothesis using an econometric analysis of an unbalanced panel of 3,865 innovative Spanish firms during 2010–2017. They employ the SABI database to obtain firms' financial and economic data and incorporate firms' MORE financial rating. Specifically, the authors use the GMM-SYS technique to regress and measure the marginal effects of innovation subsidies size on firms' R&D investment and the influence of firms' financial constraints.

The results of this work indicate that financial constraints negatively moderate the effect of subsidies on R&D investment; that is, those firms that receive a subsidy and suffer financial constraints invest less in R&D projects than those which also receive the subsidy and do not suffer financial constraints. Besides, this work found that innovation subsidies alone do not significantly increase firms' R&D investment.

From a neoclassical point of view, the existence of financial constraints is the justification of public innovation policies. However, due to the difficulty of measuring financial constraints, innovation literature has abandoned the analysis of this crucial variable. This work reintroduces this vital variable and analyses how it interacts with innovation subsidies on firms' R&D investment.

Overtourism is an emerging concept and a perennial process every destination is going through. It is a cyclic phenomenon derived from the destination, retained in the destination and at last demised by the destination. It's a kind of ‘tourism illness’ spreading rapidly in every destination in the present scenario. The status of overtourism in every destination has been caused by the tourist, of the tourist and for the tourist. In the context of religious places in Odisha, overtourism is a ‘disorder’ that cannot be mitigated, as religiosity, faith and spiritualism have propelled and governed people's sentiment and emotion. Hence ambiguity arises out of making an intrigue situation between a myth or a spiritual sojourn bounded by faith and belief. This chapter significantly contributes by unfolding the existing literature by providing the origin and evolution of overtourism, various stated definitions by the different authors, causes and consequences, and overtourism in religious destinations by adopting an exploratory study, particularly in case of the Golden triangle of Odisha.

Research on high-growth firms (HGFs) or gazelles is expanding due to their significant contribution to job growth and economic development. However, the knowledge about the conditions and factors that set these firms on their rapid growth trajectory remains fragmented. Therefore, this chapter provides an abreast inventory of the surging gazelle studies by systematically reviewing the international gazelle growth literature and consolidating firm-level, industry-level, and macroeconomic-level growth factors and their interactions as elaborated in the studies. Based on the review of 62 international empirical studies, this chapter finds that the gazelle growth is complex and multidimensional in its scope and nature. The firm’s growth intention and entrepreneurial nature emerge as necessary but not sufficient conditions to guarantee rapid growth as it results from the impact of and interaction between various firm-level and external factors. The different growth-influencing factors are summarized using a theoretical gazelle growth model, which supports the rare and temporal nature of the gazelle growth.

High-growth firms (HGFs) make a considerable contribution to economic growth, and in recent years they have received increasing interest from entrepreneurship scholars. By analysing recent findings in the literature of high-growth firms, this study identifies some Stylized Facts, as well as contradictory findings, and also some unknowns regarding the determinants and internal strategies of HGFs, particularly on the persistence of their superior growth performance and the implications of recent findings for economic policy.

This paper analyzes county-level firm births across the United States using a spatial count model that permits spatial dependence, cross-correlation among different industry types, and over-dispersion commonly found in empirical count data. Results confirm the presence of spatial autocorrelation (which can arise from agglomeration effects and missing variables), industry-specific over-dispersion, and positive, significant cross-correlations. After controlling for existing-firm counts in 2008 (as an exposure term), parameter estimates and inference suggest that a younger work force and/or clientele (as quantified using each county’s median-age values) is associated with more firm births (in 2009). Higher population densities is associated with more new basic-sector firms, while reducing retail-firm starts. The modeling framework demonstrated here can be adopted for a variety of settings, harnessing very local, detailed data to evaluate the effectiveness of investments and policies, in terms of generating business establishments and promoting economic gains.