Finance Webinar（2020-19)

Topic: The Financing of R&D and Investment

Speaker: Bronwyn H. Hall, University of California at Berkeley

Time: Wednesday, 4 November,09: 00-10:30 Beijing Time

Location: Microsoft Teams Online Conference Room

Abstract:

Evidence on the "funding gap" for investment in R&D and innovation is surveyed. The focus is on financial market reasons for under-investment that exist even when externality-induced under-investment is absent. I present the several ways of testing the hypothesis that firms are financially constrained when facing good investment possibilities. Findings are that while small and new innovative firms experience high costs of capital that are only partly mitigated by the presence of venture capital, the evidence for high costs of R&D capital for large firms is mixed. Nevertheless, large established firms do appear to prefer internal funds for financing such investments and they manage their cash flow to ensure this.

Introduction:

Bronwyn Hall is Professor of Economics Emerita at the University of California at Berkeley, Visiting Professor at MPI-Munich, Research Associate at the NBER, IFS-London, and the Innovation Lab, College de France. She has published numerous articles on the economics and econometrics of technical change and innovation and is the editor of the Handbook of the Economics of Innovation in the Elsevier series of economic handbooks. Her research includes analysis of the use of intellectual property systems in developed and developing countries, the valuation of intangible (knowledge) assets, comparative firm level R&D investment and innovation studies, measuring the returns to R&D and innovation, and analysis of technology policies such as R&D subsidies and tax incentives. She has made substantial contributions to applied economic research via the creation of software for econometric estimation and of firm level datasets for the study of innovation, including the widely used NBER dataset for U.S. patents.

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