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on Small Business Management |
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Issue of 2019‒02‒04
eleven papers chosen by João Carlos Correia Leitão Universidade da Beira Interior |
| By: | Aghion, Philippe; Bergeaud, Antonin; Cette, Gilbert; Lecat, Rémy; Maghin, Hélène |
| Abstract: | In this paper we identify two counteracting effects of credit access on productivity growth: on the one hand, better access to credit makes it easier for entrepreneurs to innovate; on the other hand, better credit access allows less efficient incumbent firms to remain longer on the market, thereby discouraging entry of new and potentially more efficient innovators. We first develop a simple model of firm dynamics and innovation-base growth with credit constraints, where the above two counteracting effects generate an inverted-U relationship between credit access and productivity growth. Then we test our theory on a comprehensive French manufacturing firm-level dataset. We first show evidence of an inverted-U relationship between credit constraints and productivity growth when we aggregate our data at sectoral level. We then move to firm-level analysis, and show that incumbent firms with easier access to credit experience higher productivity growth, but that they also experienced lower exit rates, particularly the least productive firms among them. To confirm our results, we exploit the 2012 Eurosystem's Additional Credit Claims (ACC) program as a quasiexperiment that generated exogenous extra supply of credits for a subset of incumbent firms. |
| Keywords: | inverted-u relationship; credit; eurosystem |
| JEL: | J1 F3 G3 |
| Date: | 2018–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91711&r=all |
| By: | Marialuisa Divella (Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Universita' Politecnica delle Marche); Alessandro Sterlacchini (Department of Economics and Social Sciences, Universita' Politecnica delle Marche) |
| Abstract: | This paper provides a micro-econometric analysis of the factors facilitating the introduction of responsible innovations by firms, with a focus on those aimed at improving occupational health and safety. These innovations have been rarely investigated with quantitative methods, especially if compared to those aimed at protecting the environment. Accordingly, we also assess whether firms pursuing health and safety innovations are also those ascribing high importance to the reduction of environmental impacts. The evidence provided by using firm-level data taken from the Italian Community Innovation Surveys highlights the key role played by some external sources of knowledge and internal human resource practices for the achievement of responsible innovations. Many similarities but also important differences between firms emerge, according to whether they are committed to health and safety or environmental innovation. |
| Keywords: | responsible innovation, occupational health and safety; environment protection. |
| JEL: | O31 Q55 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:anc:wpaper:435&r=all |
| By: | Rumen Dobrinsky (The Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies, wiiw) |
| Abstract: | The paper presents an analytical assessment of the implementation of European Innovation Partnerships (EIPs) launched as one of the commitments of the EU Flagship Initiative Innovation Union with the aim to achieve innovative breakthroughs addressing major societal challenges. The EU launched five EIPs to address important societal challenges (1) Active & Healthy Ageing; (2) Water; (3) Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability; (4) Raw Materials; and (5) Smart Cities and Communities. The paper reviews the rationale of introducing the EIPs as a policy intervention aimed at promoting innovation in the EU and traces the organic evolution and governance structures of the newly emerging formations. It then provides an analytical evaluation of this EU policy initiative based on factual analysis of its implementation experiences and a comparison of its objectives and actual outcomes. In particular, the paper analyses the role of the EIPs as drivers of systemic change in the European innovation ecosystem and catalysts of new innovation activity in Europe. This critical assessment serves as the basis for drawing some conclusions about the strengths and weaknesses of the EIPs as a new policy approach to foster innovation activity in Europe. One central conclusion is that while the EIPs have been very efficient in promoting collaboration among innovation stakeholders they have fallen short of breeding innovation activity of the expected scope and scale. The paper analyses the reasons for this weakness and formulates some recommendations that could serve as possible remedies. |
| Keywords: | Innovation Union, innovation partnerships, innovation systems and ecosystems, innovation policy, innovation governance |
| JEL: | O25 O32 O38 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wii:rpaper:rr:438&r=all |
| By: | Madaleno, Margarida; Nathan, Max; Overman, Henry; Waights, Sevrin |
| Abstract: | A growing wave of co-location programmes promises to boost growth for young firms. Despite great public and policy interest we have little idea whether such programmes are effective. This paper categorises accelerators and incubators within a larger family of ‘co-location' interventions. We then develop a single framework to theorise workspace-level impacts. We summarise available evaluation evidence and sketch implications for regional economic policy. We find clear evidence programmes are effective overall. But we know little about how effects operate – or who benefits. Providers and policymakers should experiment further to establish optimal designs. |
| Keywords: | incubators; accelerators; entrepreneurship; clusters; cities; economic development |
| JEL: | L2 O32 R30 R58 |
| Date: | 2018–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91697&r=all |
| By: | Alexander Konon; Alexander Kritikos |
| Abstract: | The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices—from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career prediction and advice, involving a comparison of average trait scores of successful entrepreneurs with the traits of potential entrepreneurs. Based on a simple theoretical model estimated with SOEP data and analyzed with Monte Carlo methods, we show, for the first time, that the choice of the comparison method matters substantially. We reveal that under certain conditions the performance of average profiles is inferior to the tossing of a coin. Alternative methods, such as directly estimating success probabilities, deliver better performance and are more robust. |
| Keywords: | Advice, personality, entrepreneurship, profiles |
| JEL: | C15 D81 L26 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:diw:diwsop:diw_sp1012&r=all |
| By: | Giovanni Marin (University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy; SEEDS, Italy); Marco Modica (Gran Sasso Science Institute, Italy; SEEDS, Italy) |
| Abstract: | The Great Recessions a ected the Italian economy in a particularly severe way in terms of GDP collapse, increase in the unemployment rate and also in terms of number of firms that left the market. Moreover, because of its peculiar structural features, that is characterized by a business sector composed prevalently by a large number of micro and small firms, the Italian economy results to be particularly exposed to recession periods, especially so when these periods are prolonged and hit many sectors in the economy. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the Great Recession on the survival of firms for universe of Italian individual firms. Our main contributions consist in the estimation of an indicator to capture the local demand shocks in order to infer about the link between local demand shock, firms' characteristics and hazard of exit. General results show that the conditional and unconditional hazard of exit is larger for female, old and foreign-born entrepreneurs. However, when considering the e ect of local demand shocks, this appears to be stronger for female, old, Italian entrepreneurs and for entrepreneurs located in highly- exposed labour market areas. |
| Keywords: | Resilience, Micro-firms, Survival, Great Recession |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:srt:wpaper:0119&r=all |
| By: | Nikolay Chichkanov (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Ian Miles (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Veronika Belousova (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | The development of service industries in emerging economies has been attracting more attention in recent years, but to date there have been few studies of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) in these countries. (The main exception is the case of a specific sector – software and related Information Technology services, with most focus here being on India. KIBS as a whole have received little examination.) This paper aims to study how conditions for innovation influence innovation activities in KIBS in one of the largest emerging countries, Russia. The study draws on survey data from firms belonging to ten KIBS subsectors, based in major Russian cities in 2015. The results contrast with those generally reported in Western developed economies. In this particular emerging economy, firms experiencing negative market and knowledge conditions are actually more liable to undertake nontechnological innovations. We consider various explanations for this apparent anomaly. The institutional framework appears to be less essential for KIBS than has been earlier documented for manufacturing enterprises in Russia. Implications for innovation management and policy are outlined: both government and corporate, strategies here would benefit from more attention to these sectors |
| Keywords: | KIBS, conditions for innovation, emerging economies |
| JEL: | O30 O31 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:92sti2019&r=all |
| By: | Kinne, Jan; Lenz, David |
| Abstract: | Innovation is considered as a main driver of economic growth. Promoting the development of innovation through STI (science, technology and innovation) policies requires accurate indicators of innovation. Traditional indicators often lack coverage, granularity as well as timeliness and involve high data collection costs, especially when conducted at a large scale. In this paper, we propose a novel approach on how to create firm-level innovation indicators at the scale of millions of firms. We use traditional firm-level innovation indicators from the questionnaire-based Community Innovation Survey (CIS) survey to train an artificial neural network classification model on labelled (innovative/non-innovative) web texts of surveyed firms. Subsequently, we apply this classification model to the web texts of hundreds of thousands of firms in Germany to predict their innovation status. Our results show that this approach produces credible predictions and has the potential to be a valuable and highly cost-efficient addition to the existing set of innovation indicators, especially due to its coverage and regional granularity. The predicted firm-level probabilities can also directly be interpreted as a continuous measure of innovativeness, opening up additional advantages over traditional binary innovation indicators. |
| Keywords: | Web Mining,Web Scraping,R&D,R&I,STI,Innovation,Indicators,Text Mining,Natural Language Processing,NLP,Deep Learning |
| JEL: | O30 C81 C83 |
| Date: | 2019 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:zewdip:19001&r=all |
| By: | Berlingieri, Giuseppe; Calligaris, Sara; Criscuolo, Chiara |
| Abstract: | Ever since Moore (1911) a large empirical and theoretical literature has established the existence of a firm size-wage premium. At the same time, a second regularity in empirical work, linking size and productivity, has inspired a vast literature in multiple fields. However, the majority of the existing evidence is based on manufacturing data only. With manufacturing nowadays accounting for a very small share of the economy in many countries, whether productivity, size, and wages are closely linked, and how tight this link is across sectors, is still an open question. Using a unique dataset that collects micro-aggregated firm-level information on productivity, size, and wages for the entire economy in 17 countries over the 1994-2012 period, this paper unveils a much more subtle picture. First, while in the manufacturing sector both productivity and wages increase monotonically with firm size, the same is not true in the service sector. Second, a tight and positive link between wages and productivity is instead found in both manufacturing and services. The combination of these results suggests that, when looking at data for a much larger share of the economy, the "size-wage premium" becomes more a "productivity-wage premium". Unbundling the relationship between size, wages, and productivity has first-order policy implications for both workers and firms. |
| Keywords: | productivity; size-premium; wages |
| JEL: | D2 E2 J3 |
| Date: | 2018–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:91678&r=all |
| By: | Andrés Rodríguez-Pose; Min Zhang |
| Abstract: | Economic growth in China in recent decades has largely rested on the dynamism of its cities. High economic growth has coincided with measures aimed at improving the efficiency of local governments and with a mounting political drive to curb corruption. Yet the connection between government institutions and urban growth in China remains poorly understood. This paper is the first to look into the connection between government efficiency and corruption, on the one hand, and urban growth in China, on the other and to assess what is the role of institutions relative to more traditional factors for economic growth in Chinese cities. Using panel data for 283 cities over the period between 2003 and 2014, the results show that urban growth in China is a consequence of a combination of favourable human capital, innovation, density, local conditions, foreign direct investment (FDI), and, city-level government institutions. Both government quality ? especially for those cities with the best governments ? and the fight against corruption at the city level have a direct effect on urban growth. Measures to tackle corruption at the provincial level matter in a more indirect way, by raising or lowering the returns of other growth-inducing factors. |
| Keywords: | Economic growth, cities, government efficiency, corruption, China |
| JEL: | O43 R11 R58 |
| Date: | 2019–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:egu:wpaper:1904&r=all |
| By: | Lou Aisenberg; Stina Heikkilä; Antonella Noya; Filipe Santos |
| Abstract: | This report provides an in-depth analysis of the Dutch policy ecosystem in place for socialentrepreneurship and social enterprises. It identifies the country’s key strengths andchallenges and provides policy recommendations to support the development of a strongerpolicy ecosystem for social entrepreneurship and social enterprises in the country. Keypolicy issues analysed include: clarifying the conceptual framework (Chapter 2); formallyrecognising social enterprises and boosting social entrepreneurship (Chapter 3);promoting social impact measurement and reporting (Chapter 4); developing socialentrepreneurial capacity and skills (Chapter 5); improving access to markets and finance(Chapters 6 and 7); and ensuring sustainable institutional support for socialentrepreneurship and social innovation (Chapter 8). |
| Keywords: | local development, policy ecosystem, social economy, social enterprises, social entrepreneurship, social impact, social innovation |
| JEL: | L31 L33 |
| Date: | 2019–01–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:cfeaaa:2019/01-en&r=all |