Financing innovation for SMEs across Europe. Evidence from multilevel models

This paper aims to evaluate the role played by different sources of finance when analysing firms’ attitudes to innovate. The empirical investigation is based on the firm-level data for a large sample of European SMEs across the 2012–2017 period. Different measures of finance and several robustness checks are used to select a well-behaved probit multilevel model. Importantly, results show that the probability to innovate increases when firms use internal finance and grants. The same applies when funds come from family and friend channels, while no conclusive evidence is found for bank loans.