Did financial frictions stifle R&D investment in Europe during the great recession?
研究利用2008-09年全球金融危机和2012年欧元区主权债务危机导致的信贷紧缩，发现更可能受融资约束的企业在依赖外部融资的行业中研发投资下降更多，小规模、私有且资产负债表较弱的企业研发占总投资比例也更低。
We investigate the role of financial frictions in R&D spending in a large sample of European firms. Our identification strategy exploits the contraction in credit supply that followed the 2008–09 global financial crisis and 2012 Euro area sovereign debt crisis, together with differences in financial frictions across firms and industries to identify a causal effect of financial constraints on investment in innovation. We show that firms that are more likely financially constrained, in industries more dependent on external finance, invest disproportionally less in R&D during periods of tight credit supply. Smaller, private firms with weaker balance sheets also have a lower share of R&D in total investment, suggesting R&D drops more than total investment during these crisis episodes. These results are robust to different proxies of financial constraints and fixed-effects identification strategies.