This book provides a critical evaluation of the literature on finance, investment and innovation and proposes new research methods for evaluating the comparative performance of financial systems in supporting innovation. The comparative advantage of this book is that of being directly focused on one of the main unsolved issues in monetary and financial economics: the relative effectiveness of national financial systems in supporting innovation. It proposes various theoretical and empirical contributions that, taken together, allow to evaluate the relative effectiveness of some of the most important country systems such as Japan, and the UK and Italy.