CREDIT CONSTRAINTS AND THE CYCLICALITY OF R&D INVESTMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FRANCE

We use a French firm‐level data set containing 13,000 firms over the period 1994–2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms’ R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) R&D investment is countercyclical without credit constraints, but it becomes procyclical as firms face tighter credit constraints; (ii) this result is only observed for firms in sectors that depend more heavily upon external finance, or that are characterized by a low degree of asset tangibility; (iii) in more credit‐constrained firms, R&D investment plummets during recessions but does not increase proportionally during upturns.     

A MULTIATTRIBUTE DECISION-MAKING APPROACH TO THE SELECTION OF AN AUXILIARY DEVICE FOR ICEBREAKERS*

This paper describes the use of multiattribute decision making by the U.S. Coast Guard when choosing the most appropriate auxiliary device to use on an icebreaker. Five different missions of icebreakers are defined, and the objectives and attributes that describe the effectiveness of each auxiliary device in accomplishing these missions are established. For each geographical area of interest, the missions are weighted using the analytical hierarchy process. Also, group utilities are developed for attribute vectors in order to incorporate the judgments of different icebreaker operators.     

A New Multiperiod Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem with Heuristic and Application to a Scheduling Problem

A new multiperiod variation of the M-traveling salesman problem is introduced. The problem arises in efficient scheduling of optimal interviews among tour brokers and vendors at conventions of the tourism and travel industry. In classical traveling salesman problem vocabulary, a salesman is a tour broker at the convention and a city is a vendor's booth. In this problem, more than one salesman may be required to visit a city, but at most one salesman per time period can visit each city. The heuristic solution method presented is polynomial and is guaranteed to produce a nonconflicting set of salesmen's tours. The results of an implementation of the method for a recent convention are also reported.