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Successful high-technology industries enhance productivity, competition, and consumer choice. To support their innovating activities, these firms need access to finance. Given the uncertain nature of innovation, along with the high associated cost, many firms turn to equity financing. Using novel survey data for 153 indigenous equity and 141 indigenous non-equity financed high-tech firms, we examine what determines how these firms raise equity finance (i.e., independent and corporate venture capital, business angel, government-sponsored) and non-equity finance (i.e., personal investment, family and friend investment, debt finance). We find that debt finance is negatively associated with equity financing in high-tech firms. Moreover, in our sample of high-tech firms, we find that innovating firms, export-oriented firms operating in niche markets, and firms with high levels of human capital have a greater probability of being equity financed.

Using a novel self-reported measure competitive intensity and four distinct forms of innovation (product, process, marketing and organisational) from the European Commission Flash Eurobarometer 433 dataset, this paper comprehensively identifies the impact of competitive pressure on firm innovation for four broad sectors of the economy. A logit model by innovation type is used to estimate the impact of the intensity of competition on the firm’s decision to innovate. Firm reported intensity of competition is found to have a positive impact on product and market innovation. Significant heterogeneities exist in the impact of minor and major degrees of competition across innovation types and sectors supporting both Arrow’s (1962), and to a lesser degree Schumpeter’s (1943), perspectives on this relationship.

Using the Kauffman panel dataset of US start-ups, we analyse the key determinants oflicensing-in adoption. Licensing-in entails an intellectual property contract between the licensor(e.g. upstream established firm) and licensee (e.g. downstream start-up) aiming to bring aninnovation to market rapidly. Assuming maximizing of the owner’s managerial utility in thestart-up years, we explain licensing-in adoption through firm characteristics like size, R&D andcapital structure, as well as other IP types, and controls for year and regional fixed effects, usingpanel probit estimation with adjustments for sample selection bias and endogeneity. We findkey determinants of licensing-in to be owners’ equity, product (rather than service) sales andR&D spend; and then comment on their policy implications for business incubation.

This article examines the determinants of adoption of industrial designs, for intellectual property (IP) protection, in a large sample of US start-ups. While patents and copyrights are widely analy...

Using a large, longitudinal panel of US start-ups collected between 2004 and 2011, this article shows the extent to which intellectual property (IP) types, for example trademarks, patents, copyrights and outward licensing, enhance multidimensional performance. An ordered probit analysis corrected for sample selection bias, estimates performance to derive the following conclusions. First, trademarks and out-licensing IP types increase a firm’s chances of being a high performer, confirming the importance of certain forms of IP protection for start-ups. Second, patenting significantly reduces the chances of being a high performer, suggesting patenting has limited performance benefits for start-ups. Third, few performance synergies exist in the joint use of IP types, suggesting that strong complementarities among IP types are limited. While out-licensing patents and out-licensing copyrights increase performance, out-licensing patents and out-licensing trademarks diminish it. Furthermore, registering more trademarks and out-licensing more trademarks also diminishes performance, suggesting start-up firms should keep trademarks in-house.

This paper examines differences in the hazard rates of young, established and mature firms during the financial crisis, using microdata from more than 300,000 Irish firms. The findings confirm that firm size at the time of the crisis had the largest impact on the probability of exit. The liability of smallness was pronounced in mature cohorts. Industry conditions had a considerable effect on the hazard rate of young cohorts, as opposed to mature counterparts. Interestingly, agglomeration raised the hazard rates of younger cohorts only. By contrast, attributes of the labour force of the region largely influenced the hazard rates of more established firms. Firms founded before the crisis were significantly less likely to exit in the aftermath of the crisis, in comparison with firms founded just before or during the crisis, whereas more mature firms seem to be more sensitive to the economic cycle.

This paper examines a representative choice experiment for Ireland (n = 1014) to understand the trade-offs citizens are willing to make between the distribution of financial benefits from a nearby wind farm and procedural measures for citizen participation in decision-making. Both participatory processes and outcomes which recognise local impacts are necessary for the acceptance of onshore wind farms. This paper distinguishes between shared community benefit funds, near-neighbour compensation, and citizen investment relative to issues of ownership, modes of engagement and the management of financial benefits during siting, construction, and operation of a wind farm respectively. Citizens willing to accept place greater importance on factors associated with distributive and procedural justice, while proximity and related visual impacts have comparatively more importance for citizens unwilling to accept. Willingness to accept is associated with early, in-person, engagement with a community liaison officer during siting and citizen participation in the governance and distribution of financial benefits during operation. However, citizens who show conditional support for wind farm developments prefer compensation of near-neighbour households, semi-state developers, and town hall engagement meetings. Strong supporters are more influenced by financial benefits for the wider community and local (co-)ownership of wind farms, particularly joint ventures between the developer and community., The authors appreciatively acknowledge funding research project MISTRAL, 'Multi-sectoral approaches to Innovative Skills Training for Renewable energy And sociaL acceptance' under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions [grant number 813837]; and Sustainable Energy Authority Ireland project Co-Wind, 'Community Engagement in Wind Energy: Innovative approaches to achieving a social license' [grant number 18/RDD/281]. The European Union and Sustainable Energy Authority Ireland are not responsible for use that may be made of this information. The sole responsibility of this publication lies with the authors, and any errors which remain are our own. The authors would like to thank participants in focus groups which informed the design of the experiment and Rolf Wüstenhagen for comments on an early version of this paper. Our thanks also to two anonymous reviewers and participants at a workshop on the Dynamics of Social Acceptance for their feedback on this research.

Developing effective policy solutions to transition away from the use of solid fuels for residential heating purposes can be hindered by the lack of reliable data on its use. One such issue is the extent of informal solid fuel use, that is, consumption from sources outside of formal commercial channels. This is an area which has been largely ignored in previous empirical research. Using a survey of residential solid fuel users, the extent of solid fuel use in the residential sector in Ireland from informal sources for two fuels, sod peat and wood, is quantified. Sod peat is found to be almost exclusively sourced informally while just over half of wood use is estimated to be sourced by households in this way. Factors including location, household income, being a primary user of the fuel and having strong cost motivations all effect the probability of sourcing solid fuels informally relative to formal sources. The sizeable extent to which informal sources of solid fuels are used in Ireland arising from the analysis in this paper, highlights the potential for substitution to this unregulated alternative. This should be carefully monitored for effective implementation of new and existing solid fuel regulations.

This paper compares the merits of regional and firm based approaches for analysing the effect of agglomeration economies on firm deaths in Ireland. We aggregate a comprehensive data set on Irish firm deaths to Electoral Division (ED) level, the lowest geographical scale available. Estimates of the effect of agglomeration on firm deaths from a regional analysis at ED level using a cross-sectional spatial-autoregressive spatial error model are compared with firm-level estimates from a contemporary log-log model with spatially weighted agglomeration regressors. While estimates of the effects of agglomeration using these alternative methods is much discussed in existing literature rarely are the approaches or results compared. We show that contrasting results are found using the same data set dependent upon the unit of analysis used. Diversity lowers regional and firm deaths while specialisation raises regional deaths but lowers firm deaths. Greater urbanisation does not have a significant effect on firm hazard rates or equivalent regional estimates. While regional estimates provide evidence on the existence and nature of spatial dependence (negative in this case), firm estimates do not provide evidence that agglomeration in neighbouring regions is the source of this spatial dependence. No empirical analysis to our knowledge directly compares regional and firm based approaches for analysing the effect of spatial agglomeration economies on firm deaths.

Agglomeration economies are benefits that firms obtain when they locate close to one another or are constrained spatially. Tourism is heavily reliant on agglomeration economies rather than mere resource endowments. Policy formation requires an understanding of how tourism agglomeration impacts entrepreneurship within regions. In this chapter, we focus on how agglomeration economies impact enterprise birth and death rates within the tourism sector in Ireland using a comprehensive dataset on tourism firm births and deaths. Agglomeration economies have been studied in the area of regional economic growth and prosperity, but less is known about the extent to which spatial agglomeration economies affect regional firm births and deaths in the tourism sector. Our results provide evidence of positive spatial dependence in regional tourism enterprise births and deaths. Co-location of a diverse set of complementary enterprises fosters greater tourism enterprise births. Greater local specialisation rather than diversity lowers regional tourism enterprise deaths.

A simultaneous equations model of performance, strategy and size is tested using fieldwork evidence on long-lived firms in Scotland. Estimation is by I3SLS, with correction for sample selection bias. The contributions of this paper are that it: (a) grounds estimation on fieldwork evidence; (b) calibrates performance and competitive strategy; (c) tests and models endogeneity; and (d) computes robust trade-off elasticities between firm size and performance. It shows how this trade-off provides the entrepreneur with two strong incentives: (i) to seek greater efficiency typically by an increase in the human capital of the ‘core’ workforce; (ii) to achieve higher levels of performance by adopting more diverse competitive strategies.

This paper develops a real options decision support tool for raising the performance of the firm. It shows how entrepreneurs can use our intuitive tool quickly to assess the nature and type of action required for improved performance. This exploits our estimated econometric relationship between precipitators of entrepreneurial opportunities, time until exercise, and firm performance. Our 3D chromaticity plots show how staging investments, investment time, and firm performance support entrepreneurial decisions to embed, or to expedite, investments. Speedy entrepreneurial action is securely supported with this tool, without expertise in econometric estimation or in formulae for real options valuation. Postprint

This paper supports two key principles of real options reasoning: (a) the value of waiting and (b) the value of staging. It tests whether real options logic applies to small firms implementing significant changes (e.g. in technology) in a model of small firm performance, estimated on data collected by interviews with entrepreneurs. We found that to achieve a higher value by waiting, a delicate balance of precipitators of change against time until exercise is necessary (e.g. if there were just one or two precipitators, then waiting would certainly raise the value). Similarly, to achieve a higher value by staging, the entrepreneur needs to balance embedding against investment time. Thus, provided that investment time is less than 1¼ years, we found that embedding will raise the value. Overall, this implies that strategic flexibility in investment decisions is necessary for good long-run performance of small firms.

The hypothesis that flexibility enhances the long run prospects of the small firm is explored by examining precipitating causes of organizational change within it, and consequential adjustments. The study is fieldwork based and uses evidence gathered directly from entrepreneurs. New measures of flexibility and firm-specific turbulence are used to explain long-run performance, measured over 28 distinct attributes. Econometric estimates (using GLS and Heckman selectivity correction) are reported, on the relationship between flexibility, firm-specific turbulence and performance. Firm-specific turbulence is shown to have a negative effect on performance, but the latter is enhanced by increasing the flexibility of the small firm.

Kawasaki disease (KD) is the most common systemic vasculitis of childhood. The following presentation of a 4-year-old Irish boy referred to a secondary care paediatric service from the community with prolonged fever, oral mucous membrane changes and painless blistering lesions of the hands and feet in the presence of elevated inflammatory markers serves as an opportunity to discuss the diagnostic criteria and treatment for KD and incomplete KD, an often missed diagnosis with significant paediatric morbidity outside an academic paediatric centre.

Objectives: Business transfers are posing a particular problem for several European countries as the age distribution of business owners rises and as the number of firms transferred within families' declines. This paper explores firm, market, and regional differences in firms which are expected to be transferred in the British Isles against those that are expected to be disposed of. It also examines whether there are regional differences in the types of businesses which are expected to be transferred across the British Isles. Prior Work: Previous research in this area has primarily examined intergenerational succession in family businesses (Bennedsen et al. 2006), while the research into management-buyouts and trade-sales has focused on the entrepreneur's mode of entry (Parker and Van Praag, 2006). Martin et al. (2002) finds evidence that spatial differentiation exists in the vulnerability of firms to age related business transfer failure. In this paper we examine whether businesses located in relatively more economically vibrant regions within the British Isles, whether due to urban economies (Gordon and McCann 2005) or agglomeration economies (Parr 2002) or the level of entrepreneurial talent (Markley, 2006) in the region, have a lower probability of a business transfer failure. Approach: Interview evidence on the expected end-game strategy of entrepreneurs facing the risk of age related transfer failure was obtained from firms in a number of regions in the British Isles, namely the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England (800 cases). A model is developed which predicts how firm, market and regional characteristics influence whether a firm is expected to be transferred or not. Preliminary Results: Entrepreneurs who expect to dispose of the assets of the business on their retirement have a significantly lower probability of having a high level of entrepreneurial talent in the region and a higher probability of having a high level of GVA per head in the region than entrepreneurs who expect to transfer their businesses. A higher level of entrepreneurial talent (as measured by stock of businesses per resident) and a lower of GVA per head are more likely in rural regions.

In a small firm, access to information is linked with strategic awareness, a growth orientated mindset, and better performance. The advent of communication technologies has significantly changed the amount of information available, how it is being accessed, and the cost of collecting and using this information. To exploit this resource, individuals, firms, and governments must be e-ready. In this chapter, the authors examined the technological sophistication of a sample of mature small and medium sized enterprises in Scotland and analysed whether there is a link between this, some other firm-specific factors, and an entrepreneur’s succession choice. The evidence suggests while firms located in urban and suburban areas have access to ICT and may benefit from e-government services targeted at assisting them through the transfer process, older more rural firms have limited access and will only benefit if government policy is directed towards providing ICT access and making them e-ready.

An understanding of human decision making is a fundamental step toward the development of effective intelligent decision support systems (Newell & Simon, 1972; Pomerol, 1997). Many methods have been put forth by decision theory to provide us with an understanding of human decision making and to enable individuals to make better decisions such as in utility maximization (Savage, 1954), satisficing (Simon, 1983), statistical and regression analysis, case-based reasoning (Gilboa and Schmeidler, 1995, 2000), game theory (von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1947), decision trees (Yuan & Shaw, 1995), and so forth. This article focuses on a new approach, namely, real options analysis, as a tool for effective decision making by management when faced with uncertainty in its environment.

The main hypothesis examines whether real options logic is applied by entrepreneurs in undertaking key organisational change (e.g. ownership, technology, location, line of business etc.). This is explored in a model of firm performance using data collected in face-to-face interviews with entrepreneurs on the level and timing of precipitating influences of organisational change and the level and timing of consequential adjustments following organisational change. Two econometric estimation techniques (e.g. Box-Cox regression with WLS correction and Heckman sample selectivity correction) were employed. Firm performance is explained in terms of a count of real options exercised, measures of the level and timing of precipitators and consequential adjustments, plus interactions between these measures to capture firm behaviour through a real options lens. Evidence was found of the value of holding real options until uncertainties are resolved. At this point the value of waiting is at its lowest

Background: Data on perception of smoking risk amongst the Irish population are sparse. Aims: To study the accuracy and determinants of the perceived risk of premature death due to smoking in the general population and amongst general practitioners (GPs). Methods: Telephone surveys of a representative sample of Irish adults (1,247) and GPs (171; 85% response rate) asked participants to estimate how many of 1,000 20-year-old life-long smokers would die from smoking-related disease before the age of 70 and to identify the main cause of death from a list of seven causes: smoking, road traffic accidents, accidents at work, AIDS, homicide, illicit drugs and alcohol misuse. Results: In the population and GP samples, perception of the risk of smoking-related death was similar (median 200 and 150 deaths per 1,000 smokers respectively, epidemiological estimates 250/1000). Only 43% of the population identified smoking as the most important cause of death compared with 87% of GPs. Current smoking status, younger age, female gender, lower educational attainment and lower income were associated with failure to identify smoking as the main cause of death. Conclusion: Despite decades of health promotion, the general public underestimates the relative importance of smoking as a cause of death.

This paper examines the relationship between firm size, competitive strategy and performance, for the long-lived small firm in Scotland. It uses structural modelling to test the hypothesis that small firms need to remain small if they are to be long-lived. In a three-equation simultaneous model, performance, size and the dimensions of the competitive strategy of the firm are jointly determined. Econometric estimates of the three equations are reported, using 2SLS and iterated 3SLS. A trade-off is found to exist between firm size and performance. Further, we find that to attain higher equilibrium values of performance, a varied competitive strategy needs to be adopted. Our prescription is that small firms need to adjust downwards in size, and to cultivate a more varied competitive strategy, if there the entrepreneurs are to have a positive influence on performance, thus promoting longevity of their firms.

This paper focuses on a new concern in the small firm’s literature, namely what makes a small firm stay in business for a long time. It reflects a change in economic policy, away from an emphasis on volume of start-ups to an emphasis on quality of start-ups. The basic hypothesis is that flexibility enhances the long run prospects of the small firm. This is explored by examining precipitating causes of organisational change within the small firm, and the consequential adjustments. The study is fieldwork based and uses evidence from face-to-face interviews with 63 owner managers of mature small firms in Scotland. New measures of flexibility and turbulence are used to explain the performance of mature small firms. These depend on our unique body of evidence from interviews with owner managers. Performance is measured using a Likert scale over 28 distinct attributes. Econometric estimates are reported on the relationship between flexibility, turbulence and performance. This is done in two forms. The first involves generalised least squares estimatation (with heteroskedastic adjustment) of the relationship between turbulence, four measures of flexibility, and performance. The second involves Heckman sample selection estimation, of this performance relationship. It is found that turbulence has a negative effect on performance. Further, this impact is relatively large. Next in importance are those flexibility factors which can be categorised as precipitating causes of organisational change (as opposed to consequential adjustments) within the mature small firm. Finally, trade-off relationships are found to exist between two of the measures of flexibility (viz. agility and speed). We believe that this trade-off relationship is worthy of further empirical investigation

This article, which completes a two-part review of immigration health screening in Australia,1 is a chronological review of the immigration health legislation in Australia since 1958, the year the Commonwealth passed the present Migration Act 1958 (Cwlth). Other legislation reviewed includes the Migration Regulations, the Quarantine Act 1 908 and Quarantine Regulations made thereunder, including the Quarantine Regulations 2000 (Cwlth). The review describes powers to detain and deport people with prescribed diseases listed under the legislation over time, and the health criteria applied by the Department of Immigration to applicants for different visa categories and from different countries. We detail the last ten years of government policy guidelines for medical practitioners applying the health criteria, and set out the medical tests to be administered to applicants in accordance with their country of origin and with the health standards required by applicants for different visa classes. Most nations have powers to regulate the entry of non-citizens on health grounds. The modern history of this regulation its connection to the very emergence of nations over the past two centuries has received considerable, and increasing, historical attention. This is particularly the case in recent histories of nationalism and public health in the United States (US).2 From the late nineteenth century, and thus often linked to a global wave of Chinese exclusion acts, health criteria for entrants were increasingly specified. Scholars have demonstrated how national population policies were implemented through health screening, which in this early period had clear race-based and eugenic rationales, usually, but not always, explicit. However, Amy Fairchild, writing comparatively of each US border (with Canada, with Mexico, and on the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans), has argued that the famous Ellis Island procedures for health screening were more an induction into US industrial culture than a means for exclusion on health grounds. As Bashford has argued elsewhere, the immigration history of twentieth-century Australia, including the 'White Australia Policy', is closely connected with the history of Australian public health policy and practice.3

EPA Research Report No. 407 The Environmental Protection Agency has highlighted air quality issues in urban centres in Ireland in recent years. Emissions of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), attributable to the burning of solid fuels, such as coal, peat and wood, are a particular cause of concern. The complexity of the residential solid fuel sector, due to the heterogeneity of fuels being used and the lack of reliable and periodic data sources, hampers the task of developing effective policy solutions to support the continued transition away from the use of solid fuels for residential home heating. This research project aims to provide a deeper understanding of the sector using existing and new sources of data on solid fuel use. Some of the aims of the project include a more detailed examination of individual solid fuels; identification of the factors that determine the use of solid fuels, including the use of solid fuels as a “supplementary” fuel; and a quantification of the use of non-traded solid fuels, i.e. purchases made through informal markets or the own production and use of harvested peat, wind-blown trees or foraged wood.