How do employee training and knowledge stocks affect product innovation?

The main purpose of this paper is to explore how interactions of knowledge flows and knowledge stocks could shape firms’ innovative performance. Knowledge flows are measured on the grounds of human resource training practices while different levels and forms of knowledge stocks (i.e. educational attainment, exporting activity, and firm age) are considered. We make use of two-period panel probit regressions and a rich data survey of the 524 largest Greek manufacturing firms conducted in two waves (2011 and 2013). Our findings suggest that the beneficial effects of knowledge flows strengthen when knowledge stocks accumulated by employees’ education and firm age are low. When knowledge stocks are limited, knowledge flows can act as a bridge for product innovation. On the contrary, when knowledge stocks are high, higher investments in knowledge flows may lead to diminishing returns and, thus, to decreased innovation performance beyond a certain point.     

Causality in EU macroeconomic variables

This article investigates the interdependence of macroeconomics, financial and other variables for European Union countries using a multivariate vector autoregressive (VAR) approach for quarterly data. The VAR analysis is applied to all bivariate cases, and the best fitted models are selected in order to conduct Granger causality testing and impulse response functions. Contrary to the existing literature, this study reveals evidence of a unilateral direction between several cases and ambiguous results regarding Impulse response functions analysis.     

Technoeconomic analysis of a VDSL2/G.fast vectoring network: a case study from Greece

NETNOMICS: Economic Research and Electronic Networking - Following the increasing need for higher broadband speeds, the European Commission (EC) has set specific goals to all member states...     

Inside the black box of high-growth firms in a crisis-hit economy: corporate strategy,employee human capital and R&D capabilities

In an attempt to open the black box of high-growth firms within turbulent economic environments, this paper explores the role of corporate strategy, employee human capital and R&D capabilities in achieving exceptional growth performance in a crisis-hit economy. Relative and absolute growth measures based on both employment and sales are computed utilizing survey data on 1500 firms in the midst of the Greek crisis. Our findings indicate that adopting a geographical diversification strategy significantly increases the likelihood of becoming a fast-growing firm, irrespective of the growth metric used. Entering in diverse product markets and taking advantage of R&D capabilities appear to additionally contribute to relative employment change in HGFs of smaller size. Based on the absolute employment growth indicator, we provide some evidence that HGFs of larger size are able to grow fast through product diversification, acquiring other firms or by investing on training low-skilled employees. Nevertheless, hiring already highly educated persons seems to matter only for sales HGFs, while research collaborations are found to negatively affect the probability of growing fast in terms of sales.