Effect of R&D expenditures and funding strategies on the market value of biotech firms

Market value of biotech firms is important to investors and venture capitalists who keep this industry alive and dynamic. It is a particularly valuable index of investors' estimate of current and future success of the firms in this industry because other conventional indices of performance and success are inappropriate, Our hypothesis is that market value in this industry can be explained in terms of funding strategies and R&D expenditures. Using all sixty publicly-held biotech firms, that are included in a national directory for such firms engaged in the research of biotech products for human use, we estimate multiple regression models that explain most of the variance in market value using funding strategies and R&D expenditures (R-squared = 0.93). Our models also demonstrated that small biotech firms (<$10 million in total revenue) are substantially different from larger ones.