Sybrand Schim van der Loeff

Financial Constraint and R&D Investment: Evidence from CIS

Using direct information on financial constraints from questionnaires, rather than the commonly used balance sheet information, this paper presents evidence that, controlling for traditional factors as size, market share, cooperative arrangement, and expected profitability, financial constraints affect a firms decision of how much to invest in R&D activities. Apart from these constraints, other hampering factors as market uncertainty and institutional bottlenecks, regulations and organizational rigidities also affect R&D investment. A semiparametric estimator of sample selection is employed to control for potential endogeneity of the regressors. The paper also shows that old firms and firms that belong to a group are less financially constrained when it comes to undertaking R&D activities. For the estimation a semiparametric binary choice model is used.

Effectiveness of a Voluntary Postsecondary Remediation Program in Mathematics

This chapter evaluates a postsecondary remediation program in mathematics, aiming to ease the transition from high school to university and to improve the success rates in the first year of bachelor studies. The remediation program consists of voluntary bridging education in the format of an online summer course. We investigate five cohorts of in total 4500 students of Maastricht University School of Business and Economics, with 578 participants in the remedial education program. Effect analysis suggests a strong treatment effect of successful participation in the summer course. However, given the quasi-experimental setup of this study, with non-equivalent groups, selection effects may be responsible for part of that effect. Therefore, the treatment effect is corrected by applying the propensity score method, taking into consideration a wide range of student background factors. Correction of the treatment effect indicates that indeed a selection effect is present, but that a substantial treatment effect remains, of about 50% the size of the effect of being educated in high school at advanced math level rather than basic math level.

Innovation in Enterprise Clusters:Evidence from Dutch Manufacturing

This paper explores the aggregation problem and illustrates its relevance using data for the Netherlands from the third Community Innovation Survey (CIS3), and production and financial statistics. It compares the results of an innovation output equation that was estimated using data on enterprises (bedrijfseenheid), domestic enterprise clusters (onderneming), and those enterprise clusters with foreign inward or outward investments.

Cultural Differences in Learning Dispositions

Cultural differences in learning-related dispositions are investigated amongst 7,300 first year students from 81 different nationalities, using the framework of Hofstede (Culture’s consequences: international differences in work-related values. Sage, Beverly Hills, 1980). Comparing levels and intercorrelations of implicit theories of intelligence, effort beliefs, academic motivation, achievement goals, learning styles and approaches, and subject attitudes learns that traditional dichotomies often postulated in learning theories, such as those of surface versus deep learning, intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, self-regulation of learning versus external regulation, and mastery goals versus performance goals, do not manifest in different cultural clusters. In contrast, cluster profiles tend to be rather balanced. Cultural differences in intercorrelations are substantial and again indicate the difficulty of constructing culture-invariant learning theories. One of these differences regards the differentiation of several facets in performance goals and in different aspects of memorisation-based learning processes. Compared to students from other cultures, students of the Confucian culture appear to possess relative undifferentiated conceptions of performance goals and memorisation-based learning processes, what is at odds with contemporary theories of the Chinese learner.

Business Students’ Self-Theories, Goal Orientations, and Achievement Motivations

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between on the one side students’ self-theories of intelligence and goal orientations and on the other side their expectancy-value based achievement motivations. Empirical research in expectancy-value models indicates that constructs on which these models are based are important determinants of academic choice and performance (Eccles et al., 1983; Wigfield & Eccles, 2000, 2002). Since choice of tasks and persistence in tasks strongly depend on students’ beliefs about their ability and their beliefs on the role of effort in their learning, Wigfield, Tonk and Eccles (2004) hypothesize that Dweck’s model of self-theories (Dweck, 1999; Dweck & Molden, 2005) is causally related to Eccles’ expectancy-value model. The empirical investigation of this relationship in the context of first-year university students studying four academic subjects out of an economics and business program is the main research question. A preceding issue that will be investigated is the development of a measurement model for self-theory constructs.