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The relationship between financing constraints, investments in research and development (R&D) and innovative performances has recently attracted renewed attention in the aftermath of a financial crisis that has led to problems of access to the credit on which innovation activities crucially rely. In spite of past developments in the theoretical analysis and in the data and methodologies for empirical investigation, some issues have remained unexplored to date. In this introduction to the special issue, we examine the contribution of the papers it contains, which provide new conceptualisations and empirical evidence at the firm level for Europe. Most previous research results, which were mainly based on extending models of financing constraints and physical investments to R&D investments, are confirmed, while new insights about this relationship are uncovered, in terms of the structural characteristics of the …