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The study explores factors influencing research and development (R&D) costs in developing economies. The findings may inform the decision-making process for firms keen on innovation-related expenditures. The paper examines 164 Kenyan firms using the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data for 2018. These factors are classified into three broad categories. These are firm characteristics (age, size, and ownership), business competitiveness (export orientation, innovation strategies, and informal competition), and technology upgrade challenges (skills availability, financial constraint, and technology incompatibility). The findings reveal that approximately 11% of firms incurring R&D costs export their products (services). Exportation, skilled labor availability, and degree of informal competition correlate positively and significantly to R&D expenditure. The largest ownership (%) has a marginal effect on the outcome variable. Moreover, firm size substantially influences R&D costs, with small to medium firms incurring lower costs than their larger counterparts. However, firm age, innovation strategy, financial constraint, and technology incompatibility weakly influence the outcome variable. The product innovation strategy’s interaction effect with skills, firm age and informal competition substantially impacts R&D costs. Notably, firms’ R&D spending must be in tandem with the domestic informal competition intensity, skills availability, and foreign market targeted. The study employs the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression in examining the relationship between the predictors and the dependent variable.

ABSTRACT: The integration of the financial industry and financial technology (Fintech) plays a pivotal role in increasing financial services reach and inclusion for the large unbanked population in Indonesia. Fintech adoption optimization expands the financial access to formal financial institutions, especially to vulnerable groups such as the unbanked population who predominantly reside in rural areas far from formal financial institutions. Fintech is viewed as a game changer to bring finance to the unreached communities via information technology and digital financial landscape. In this causal research, data collection was done via online questionnaires to 485 Fintech users between December 2020 and April 2021. Data analysis and path modelling was performed using smartPLS 3.0 software. Result shows user innovativeness as a significant predictor, directly and indirectly affecting the adoption of Fintech in Indonesia, while user attitude found the most important factor towards Fintech adoption. Financial literacy is the least important variable to predict Fintech adoption, contrary to popular belief. This indicates that Fintech usage requires less financial literacy and is potential to reach unbanked population and those with low financial literacy. To make Fintech more inclusive, the government needs to accelerate improving Information and Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure such as widening mobile broadband penetration and soft infrastructure by encouraging Fintech startup, allowing regulatory sandbox for startups, and driving financial institutions to innovate through Fintech to bring financial services to unbanked population.

In the last decade, empirical studies focusing on business-related innovation, funding of innovation activities, and policy (implications) have continued to increase. However, not enough effort has been undertaken yet to investigate existing literature on the subject matter. To fill the gap, the present study seeks to synthesize and map out existing empirical studies on business innovation, financing, and policy framework published between 1990 and February 2019. Bibliographic analysis of relevant articles retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection was performed using Vosviewer. The bibliometric results show the prominent publication outlets, authoritative scholars and items, dominant higher learning institutions, and countries. Still, selected articles were content analyzed, providing a summary of the publications, the methodology adopted, country and period covered. The papers were classified into different themes based on the study focus, thus pinpointing areas that have received more or less scholarly attention. The identified gaps from both bibliographic and content analysis offer future research opportunities in different aspects touching on business innovation, how its financed and related policy issues.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of company industry, IPO timing, owners’ reputation and marketing efforts in investor's decision in Syrian initial public offering market IPOs Design/Methodology/Approach: A questionnaire survey was administered to 270 investors in Damascus Securities Exchange. Some descriptive statistics and One-Sample tests were used to analyze the data and test the hypotheses. Findings: The research found that investor's decision is influenced significantly by IPO timing, owner’s reputation and marketing efforts in the Syrian IPOs market. Implications/Originality/Value: This research presents that Syrian companies can use these factors as an approach to increase the quality of their IPO, on another hand, financial regulators can enhance the IPO control process, adding to the results that can contribute to understanding marketing-finance interface and behavioral finance literature.

The study examines the correlation between economic growth, investment, population growth and unemployment in Ethiopia. For the purposes of this study, secondary time series data collected from the National Bank of Ethiopia, IMF and World Bank databases were used. The study extracts the perceived relationship between the variables through principal component (PCA) analysis. Both the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy and Bartlett’s test of sphericity were used to determine the appropriateness of the dataset for PCA. The results revealed that an increase in unemployment is positively correlated, but in the opposite direction to economic growth, investment, total population and the working-age population. On top of the rapid spread of COVID-19, the present protests as a result of the political instability and ethnic problems across the country will lead to an increase in unemployment and the loss of many lives. Policymakers therefore need to emphasize and assure an increase in economic growth and investment in order to create more jobs in line with the increasing demand for jobs, particularly by young people. Moreover, the government must address the ongoing ethnic problems and political instability before it hits the economy adversely.

The paper explores the business sector and firm age effects on firm performance mediated by foreign ownership levels in domestic firms and financial leverage by examining 146 Medium Enterprises (MEs). The results show that except for ownership, the business sector, firm age, foreign ownership level, and financial leverage significantly influence performance. Foreign ownership substantially mediates the correlation between firm age and performance but not leverage. Both foreign ownership and leverage have no substantial mediating effect on the relationship between the business sector and financial performance. Moreover, the findings reveal business sectors whose performance is statistically different from zero based on the referent group.

The conception of Corporate Social Responsibility has continued to gain a lengthy discussion in all aspects of corporate finance with a particular focus on its contributing to financial performance. Despite its prominence globally, many companies have not embraced the concept, as most of them have remained doubtful about its contribution to corporate financial performance. Several companies have digressed the idea to merely an aspect of charity and cost instead of cost reduction and market creation. The fixed-effect model of panel data analysis was applied for the study period from 2010 to 2019 to measure relationships on CSR’s effect on the financial performance of listed companies in Kenya. The study used panel data for the years 2010–2019. The research used trend analysis for ten years to analyse data using canonical correlations, Logistic Regression analysis and ARIMA models to establish relationships among the variables of the study. Our results offer new evidence on the linearity effect of CSR on financial performance suggest that Corporate Social Responsibilities activities are very vital influencers of firm value, as they have a positive influence on the financial performance of companies.

Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) understood as a means to attain the United Nations 2030 agenda particularly its contribution in reducing the massive unemployment and deep-rooted poverty. Hence, the main aim of this paper is to examine the role of Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) to the survival, value creation and growth of MSEs. For this study purpose, secondary data were collected from the National Bank of Ethiopia (NBE) and triangulated with systematic review of empirical evidences. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was used to examine the relationships and significance in and between the data emerge. The empirical evidences result reveals that unlike banks, MFIs provide diverse micro credit services to address the diverse socio-economic needs of the poor who cannot afford collateral requirement and besides the result from PCA reveals that the economic growth and access to microcredit service by itself is not enough to create more jobs as they are uncorrelated. However, the empirical evidences shows that, the poorest and most vulnerable people are being left behind due to lack of access to finance, poor market linkage and inadequate skill training among many other factors. Therefore, policy-makers have to develop regulatory frameworks that build sound financial institutions and encourage competition among one another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Banks as financial institutions cannot make profits without dealing with different risks. This study aim at investigating the impact of credit risk and capital risk on the performance of Syrian private banks for a period of eight years (2009-2016) depending on a sample of 6 Syrian private banks. The results have been consistent with the ones of previous studies in term of a negative relationship between performance represented by the return of equity (ROE) and credit risk represented by non-performing loans to total loans, while have differed with previous studies in terms of the negative relationship between performance and capital risk represented by capital adequacy ratio. In order to enforce sustainability and soundness of private Syrian banks. Several recommendations have been presented by the end of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]