Documents SME 453 results

"Governments at the EU and the member state level are placing increased emphasis on public research and development (R&D) for energy and the environment to advance a circular economy (CE). To achieve CE goals, it is critical to engage SMEs as they represent the vast majority of enterprises in the EU. To date, there is a lack of evidence regarding the impact of these public R&D investments on SMEs' CE activities. We address this gap by analysing the impact of public environmental and energy R&D on CE implementation and investment by SMEs. The study draws from a multi-level database of 10,618 SMEs across 28 EU member states for the period 2013–2015 from the Flash Eurobarometer 441 survey and country-level data from other EU sources. Employing a mixed-level probit regression, we find that the knowledge generated by public environmental and energy R&D, defined as country-level investments in this activity from 2004 to 2015, positively affects SMEs' implementation of CE activities. Additionally, the study finds that public environmental and energy R&D affects the level of SMEs' investment in CE activities negatively, suggesting that more public R&D can substitute for the financial efforts that SMEs have to take when implementing CE activities."

"This paper examines the comprehensive discussion on the relationship between job creation, or destruction and firm size. More specifically, the study will determine whether the argument about small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) showing higher employment dynamics is confirmed or not. As such, the following work applies elasticities from a standard labor demand model derived from the estimations of fractional probit models for panel data, as process recommended in Papke and Wooldridge [2008; Journal of Econometrics 145(1–2): 121–133]. Elasticities are a useful measure of employment dynamics, if it is assumed that SMEs act on the same markets. The elasticity results from German establishment data illustrate that firm size does matter for the increase or decrease of employment. SMEs with less than 10 workers exhibit a higher employment dynamic, compared with other entities, at each respective percentile in the distribution of the wage share. Additionally, the outcome of the analysis weakly confirms the hypothesis that smaller firms are more restricted to capital markets, compared with large entities. The results also illustrate that firm size only explains one aspect of job creation and destruction. As stated in the well-known Hicks–Marshall rules for elasticities of factor demand, the results illustrate that the reaction of labor demand on economic changes increases with the share of labor. Firms with a high share of labor also have larger elasticities, compared with firms with a strong use of capital. Both effects, the size effect and the effect of the proportion of labor, would blend in reality, and therefore, possibly lead to controversial results for the relationship between firm size and employment dynamics. In addition, a model with a negative relationship among both variables is too simple to explain the behavior of firms."