ABSTRACT
This chapter moves from the illustrative descriptive and analytical concerns of Chapter 9 to explicit inferential methods. It has essentially two parts. First, it uses correlation analysis to investigate links between: usefulness of financial accounts, and stage of investment and performance; technopole investment, and disclosure of risk over various attributes (e.g. finance, markets, health and safety); and influence by investors on investees’ information systems (Wright and Robbie, 1996a; Mitchell et al., 1997) and stage, sector, risk reporting, etc. (Reid et al., 1997; Uher and Toakley, 1999). Second, it uses multiple regression analysis to examine the impact that investor opinion has on willingness to allocate greater or lesser volumes of funding to high-technology firms. Both approaches are unusual in that they focus on investor opinion (elsewhere, as in financial journalism, known as ‘investor sentiment’) as determinants (or correlates) of ‘real’ outcomes, like return on investment, or level of funds allocated. The contribution of this work is therefore to make outcomes directly behaviourally determined, rather than indirectly determined (e.g. intermediated by financial structure, such as gearing) (see Fisher and Statman, 2000; Wong, 2003; Brown and Cliff, 2005), which focus on investor sentiment).
