Guest editorial: Institutions and R&D investment: prospects and challenges.

As R&D investment is regarded as risky investments, it is likely that stringent investor protection laws and/or governance provisions will reduce R&D investments. This special issue deals with issues and challenges of research and development (R&D) investment with a particular focus on institutional quality. The basic argument of these studies is that strict governance regulations would increase the compliance cost and therefore firms feel discouraged to raise external capital which in turn reduces the corporate investments such as R&D investments. Moreover, the paper has found that firm-level cash flow and access to external finance also significantly affect firm-level R&D investments. [Extracted from the article]