do stronger intellectual property rights increase innovation summary do stronger intellectual property rights ipr increase innovation recent decades have seen a global transformation in ipr standards underpinned by the theory that stronger iprs spur increased incentives to innovate this study tests the impact of ever more rigorous ipr systems on innovation through an index of economic complexity of 94 countries from 1965 to 2005 our results confirm that stronger intellectual property systems engender higher levels of economic complexity nevertheless only countries with an initial above average level of development and complexity enjoy this effect

the effects of human resource management practices on productivity a study of steel finishing lines the authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies the productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices which include incentive pay teams flexible job assignments employment security and training achieve substantially higher levels of productivity than do lines with the more traditional approach which includes narrow job definitions strict work rules and hourly pay with close supervision their results are consistent with recent theoretical models which stress the importance of complementarities among work practices

managing the protection of innovations in knowledge intensive business services abstract how do knowledge intensive business services kibs protect their inventions from imitation by rival firms when choosing among various protection mechanisms data from the 2003 statistics canada innovation survey on services are used to investigate this issue by looking into complementarities substitution and independence among eight protection mechanisms a multivariate probit mvp model is estimated to take into account the fact that kibs simultaneously consider many alternative intellectual property ip protection methods when they attempt to protect their innovations results show that patents registration of design patterns trademarks secrecy and lead time advantages over competitors constitute legal and informal methods that are used jointly these complementarities suggest that ip protection mechanisms that are interdependent and reinforce each other to protect innovations from imitation by rival firms constitute a pattern on which firms rely to protect their innovations from imitation a second pattern is based on the fact that kibs rely on patents and complexity of designs as substitutes and tend to use registration of design patterns and complexity of designs as substitutes in protecting their innovations from imitation a third emerging pattern concerns protection mechanisms that are independent from each other and exhibit no synergy and do not reinforce each other to protect innovations from imitation by other firms

complementarity and external linkages the strategies of the large firms in biotechnology in biotechnology large firms enter into different kinds of linkages with universities and small medium sized research intensive firms we test the hypothesis that the strategies of external linkage of the large firms with other parties are complementary to one another we show that if any two strategies are complementary i e undertaking more of one strategy raises the marginal value of the other then they are positively correlated using data for a sample large us european and japanese chemical and pharmaceutical producers we find that the strategies above are positively correlated even after controlling for firm specific characteristics

spillovers and governance an analysis of knowledge and reputational spillovers in information technology investigating spillovers potential costs and benefits to a firm that extend beyond an individual transaction i integrate transaction cost theory and the knowledge based view of the firm in an effort to better understand the efficient governance of knowledge contracts with detailed task descriptions were associated with transactions with the potential to generate new and reusable knowledge the risk of a firm s technology spilling over to others and the risk of reputation impairing spillovers were associated with suppliers using their own employees rather than subcontractors thus results suggest that the creation and protection of knowledge are key factors in understanding governance decisions

demand pull technology push and government led incentives for non incremental technical change abstract rising expectations about future demand for new technologies increase the incentives for investments in innovation by enlarging payoffs to successful innovations how well does this notion of demand pull apply to non incremental technological change when demand is largely attributable to actions by governments in this case inventors of the most important inventions did not respond positively to strong demand pull policies filing of highly cited patents declined precipitously just as demand for wind power created a multi billion dollar market three explanations for this apparent inconsistency with the demand pull hypothesis played a role 1 the rapid convergence on a single dominant design limited the market opportunity for non incremental technical improvements 2 even though the policies implemented were stringent enough to stimulate demand uncertainty in their longevity dampened the incentives for inventions that were likely to take several years to pay off and 3 alternative explanations such as declining r d funding and weakening presidential engagement on energy appear to have been important

strategizing by firms in the presence of markets for resources strategizing by firms from the resource based view is concerned with the process through which firms acquire a distinctive bundle of resources that is costly and time consuming for competitors to duplicate or imitate a central question facing any firm therefore is its strategy for accumulating the resources that underpin its production activities in this article the process of resource accumulation is discussed as one involving potentially both internal resource development and external resource acquisition from the perspective of the strategic issues involved in making a choice between these options emerging markets for technologies and know how through licensing and other forms of resource exchange have opened up new avenues through which firms may jostle for advantage the article is concerned with three major aspects of this process illustrating the discussion with cases from biotechnology and pharmaceuticals first the strategizing by firms around the internal development vs external sourcing issue is discussed as informed by the practices of leading firms and how these lend greater variety of strategic options for firms second the potential competitive advantages as well as disadvantages to be secured by firms through the process of external sourcing as compared with the well known potential advantages accruing to incumbents through internal development such as time compression diseconomies and causal ambiguity and third the criteria to be used by firms to strategically evaluate resources individually as contrasted with the strategic evaluation of the resource bundle or totality these criteria it is argued turn on the issues of marginal value contribution resource complementarities and synergies resource variety and transferability involving intellectual property issues successful firms it is argued expand their options through blending internal resource accumulation with external resource leverage thereby deepening their distinctive dynamic capabilities this approach extends the framework of the rbv enabling it to encompass resource driven schumpeterian competition and such aspects of industrial dynamics as specialization modularization and imitative challenge copyright 2003 oxford university press

the changing technology of technological change general and abstract knowledge and the division of innovative labour abstract in the past most innovations have resulted from empiricist procedures the outcome of each trial yielding knowledge that could not be readily extended to other contexts while trial and error may remain the primary engine of innovation developments in many scientific disciplines along with progress in computational capabilities and instrumentation are encouraging a new approach to industrial research instead of relying purely on trial and error the attempt is also to understand the principles governing the behaviour of objects and structures the result is that relevant information whatever its source can now be cast in frameworks and categories that are more universal the greater universality makes it possible for the innovation process to be organised in new ways firms can specialise and focus upon producing new knowledge and the locus of innovation may be spread across both users and producers more generally the use of general and abstract knowledge in innovation opens up the possibility for a division of labour in inventive activity the division of innovative labour the implications for public policy especially that on intellectual property rights are discussed

complementarities of innovation activities an empirical analysis of the german manufacturing sector abstract innovation strategies in manufacturing often involve internal rd it is based on data from the german part of the community innovation survey cis 3 the results provide evidence for significant complementarities between internal r d and r d cooperation but cast doubt on the complementarity of internal and contracted r d since a productivity effect on firms patenting probability or sales with new products cannot be found

keeping organizational secrets protective institutional mechanisms and their costs the notion that firms generate rents from proprietary knowledge is widely accepted however the mechanisms that firms as institutions can differentially deploy to protect their knowledge form appropriation by rivals are not well understood this paper examines three broad classes of protective mechanisms that firms coon deploy to keep their knowledge secret rules compensation schemes and structural isolation the paper concludes that keeping organizational secrets through the deployment of protective mechanisms is both difficult and costly economizing considerations can therefore be expected to bear strongly on this aspect of firm organization copyright 1997 by oxford university press

knowledge management does capture impede creation economists and strategic management theorists interested in sustained competitive advantage often examine firms management of knowledge somewhat surprisingly the interaction between knowledge creation and knowledge capture practices has received little attention using survey data from nearly 900 australian firms we examine this issue paying particular attention to whether knowledge capture impedes knowledge creation we find that firms which favor closed learning practices tend to rely more upon patents and secrecy and eschew lead time and brands as ways to capture profits firms that favor open styles of learning operate in the opposite manner copyright 2009 the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

contestability queues and governmental entry deterrence this paper demonstrates that a perverse kind of entry deterrence can result when government subsidized production is combined with non price rationing in the form of queuing even though queuing leads to a total cost to the consumer not including the tax cost that is higher than the cost of an unsubsidized private supplier and even though the government s money price is rigid the market is not contestable the key to the result is that the waiting cost portion of the consumer s acquisition cost declines immediately upon entry and losses would be forced upon the entrant privatization would negate the entry deterrence thus leading to entry increased output at lower full prices lower average production costs decreased waiting costs increased profits and increased consumer surplus

bounds on average and quantile treatment effects of job corps training on wages we review and extend nonparametric partial identification results for average and quantile treatment effects in the presence of sample selection these methods are applied to assessing the wage effects of job corps united states largest job training program targeting disadvantaged youth excluding hispanics our estimates suggest positive program effects on wages both at the mean and throughout the wage distribution across the demographic groups analyzed the statistically significant estimated average and quantile treatment effects are bounded between 4 6 and 12 percent and 2 7 and 14 percent respectively we also document that the program s wage effects vary across quantiles and demographic groups

the effect of schooling on cognitive skills how schooling a ects cognitive skills is a fundamental question forstudies of human capital and labor markets while scores on cognitive ability testsare positively associated with schooling it ha

licensing a non drastic innovation under double informational asymmetry this paper deals with the problem faced by a patentee owning a new production process whose value is unknown ex ante the patentee must license the new technology to users in order to profit from it and each potential licensee has production costs using the technology that are unknown to everyone until after contracting at which point each licensee gets private information about her own costs moreover the patentee cannot observe outputs of potential licensees and therefore must use lump sum rather than per unit royalty schedules to license the technology in this setting the optimal licensing scheme from both the industry and the innovator viewpoints is defined as well as the socially optimal dynamic industrial structure to market the technology welfare aspects of regulation on patents length are also discussed in this context

does job corps work impact findings from the national job corps study this paper presents findings from an experimental evaluation of job corps the nation s largest training program for disadvantaged youths the study uses survey data collected over four years and tax data over nine years on a nationwide sample of 15 400 treatments and controls the job corps model has promise program participation increases educational attainment reduces criminal activity and increases earnings for several postprogram years based on tax data however the earnings gains were not sustained except for the oldest participants nonetheless job corps is the only federal training program that has been shown to increase earnings for this population

upstream competition between vertically integrated firms we propose a model of two tier competition between vertically integrated firms and unintegrated downstream firms we show that even when integrated firms compete in prices to offer a homogeneous input the bertrand logic may collapse and the input may be priced above marginal cost in equilibrium these partial foreclosure equilibria are more likely to exist when downstream competition is fierce or when unintegrated downstream competitors are relatively inefficient we discuss the impact of several regulatory tools on the competitiveness of the wholesale market

safe nests in global nets internationalization and appropriability of r d in wireless telecom this paper documents the case of the wireless telecom industry to bring new empirical evidence to the debate on the internationalization of research and development r d activities us patent statistics on the four industry leaders ericsson motorola nokia and qualcomm illustrate the growing trend of the internationalization of r d over the 1990s yet we show that the most critical r d projects related to the development of wireless standards remain homebound the paper then leverages qualitative data collected through interviews with informed managers to provide a fresh interpretation for the homeboundedness of critical industrial r d the stickiness of core r d projects to domestic locations is related not only to organizational inertia and the unripe maturation of subsidiaries as suggested by prior literature but particularly to the headquarters centralization of intellectual property ip management which offers a high level of appropriability of r d results the unequal distribution of appropriability across corporate r d networks is at the base of the formation of safe nests domestic r d centers that are sheltered from the forces of globalization because they offer a desirable setting for the exploitation of technologies deriving from a stronger coordination of inventive activities with the management of ip

training wages and sample selection estimating sharp bounds on treatment effects this paper empirically assesses the wage effects of the job corps program one of the largest federally funded job training programs in the u s even with the aid of a randomized experiment the impact of a training program on wages is difficult to study because of sample selection a pervasive problem in applied microeconometric research wage rates are only observed for those who are employed and employment status itself may be affected by the training program this paper develops an intuitive trimming procedure for bounding average treatment effects in the presence of sample selection in contrast to existing methods the procedure requires neither exclusion restrictions nor a bounded support for the outcome of interest identification results estimators and their asymptotic distribution are presented the bounds suggest that the program raised wages consistent with the notion that the job corps raises earnings by increasing human capital rather than solely through encouraging work the estimator is generally applicable to typical treatment evaluation problems in which there is nonrandom sample selection attrition copyright wiley blackwell

long run effects of youth training programs experimental evidence from argentina we study the effect of a job training program for low income youth in cordoba argentina the program included life skills and vocational training as well as internships with private sector employers participants were allocated by means of a public lottery we rely on administrative data on formal employment employment spells and earnings to establish the effects of the program in the short term 18 months but also exceptionally for programs of this type in latin america and in developing countries in general in the medium term 33 months and in the long term 48 months the results indicate sizable gains of about 8 percentage points in formal employment in the short term about 32 higher than the control group although these effects dissipate in the medium and in the long term contrary to previous results for similar programs in the region the effects are substantially larger for men although they also seem to fade in the long run program participants also exhibit earnings about 40 higher than those in the control group and an analysis of bounds indicates that these gains result from both higher employment levels and higher wages the detailed administrative records also allow us to shed some light on the possible mechanisms underlying these effects a dynamic analysis of employment transitions indicates that the program operated through an increase in the persistence of employment rather than from more frequent entries into employment the earnings effect and the higher persistence of employment suggest that the program was successful in increasing the human capital of participants although the transient nature of these results may also reflect better matches from a program induced increase in informal contacts or formal intermediation jel j08 j24 j68 o15

patents licensing and market structure in the chemical industry abstract the strategies of rent appropriation and industry structure are inter dependent how firms use patents depends upon industry structure and in turn affects industry structure in the 19th century market leaders in the chemical industry combined patents and secrecy to deter entry within cartels patents were used to stabilize cartels and organize technology licensing the role of patents changed in the less concentrated post world war ii markets in bulk organic chemicals and petrochemicals chemical producers use licensing as an important means of generating revenue from process innovations the increased importance of technology licensing is closely related to the emergence of a class of specialized process design and engineering firms that have played an important role in the development and diffusion of process innovations

the relative effectiveness of patents and secrecy for appropriation abstract changes in patent law global competition and the rise of several new technologies suggest that patents could be of greater value than secrecy for many innovative firms particularly small firms that are unable to use market power or other factors to appropriate their investments in innovation data from the 1993 european community innovation survey cis for up to 2849 r d performing firms is analysed to determine the relative importance of secrecy vs patents this particular combination of appropriation methods is interesting because secrecy can act as a mutually exclusive alternative to patents the results show that a higher percentage of firms in all size classes rate secrecy as more valuable than patents however ordered logit regressions show that the probability that a firm rates secrecy as more valuable than patents declines with an increase in firm size for product innovations while there is no relationship for process innovations the firm s r d intensity has no effect on the relative value of secrecy vs patents there is weak evidence to show that participation in cooperative r d increases the value of patents over secrecy for product innovations the results are relevant to ongoing debates over changes to the patent system and the need for policies to encourage small firms to patent more

inefficient hiring in entry level labor markets hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities if this information is public workers obtain its benefits if workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them firms will hire too few inexperienced workers i determine the effects of hiring workers and revealing more information about their abilities through a field experiment in an online marketplace i hired 952 randomly selected workers giving them either detailed or coarse public evaluations both hiring workers and providing more detailed evaluations substantially improved workers subsequent employment outcomes under plausible assumptions the experiment s market level benefits exceeded its cost suggesting that some experimental workers had been inefficiently unemployed

rationing and rent dissipation in the presence of heterogeneous individuals this paper discusses the implications of rationing by waiting when consumers have different time costs and personal valuations the joint distribution function of time costs and personal valuations is used to characterize market equilibrium it is argued that under certain conditions an increase in the variance of time costs will reduce the dissipation of rent furthermore it is shown that introducing a secondary market for a rationed good does not necessarily improve welfare because total surplus under rationing by waiting depends more on the variance than on the level of time costs and personal valuations the model is also used to discuss other institutions that involve rent seeking activities such as the patent system and import quotas

testing for complementarities in reduced form regressions a note abstract in many cases it is important to know whether choice variables for a decision maker are mutual complements but a structural model cannot be estimated a unified framework for testing for complementarity through reduced form regressions is provided

efficient user charges in a rent seeking model efficient user charges in a rent seeking model this paper examines efficient user charges on governmentally provided facilities in the presence of rent seeking we find that the efficient user charge depends upon the relative slopes of the demand curve for the use of the facility and the corresponding marginal cost curve as well as the level of rent seeking over the revenue raised except for a special case the efficient user charge is found to differ from the charge indicated by the intersection of demand and marginal cost curves examples show that actual user charges on government facilities are often set at inefficient levels i introduction governments control access to many services facilities and resources for which either no charge or only a token charge is imposed on users under the prompting of concerns over budgetary deficits and utilization efficiency there is increased interest in user charges on a wide array of government facilities 1 by placing charges on government facilities or by increasing existing charges toward efficient levels significant amounts of revenue can be raised and consumption decisions made more responsive to cost conditions this paper concentrates on the efficiency justification of user charges in particular the question of what is the efficient user charge to impose on access to an existing facility controlled by government is addressed abstracting from problems associated with incomplete information on the relevant demand and cost conditions the answer to this question may seem obvious the standard analysis indicates that the efficient price for a good whether imposed by market forces or by government authorities is determined by the intersection of the demand curve and the marginal cost curve this answer is clearly correct in the case of market prices however the intersection of the demand and marginal cost curves will determine the efficient governmentally imposed user charge only if there are no efficiency relevant differences between government prices and market prices by recognizing a fundamental difference between government prices and market prices the analysis in this paper qualifies the standard view on efficient user charges the distinction between government and market prices arises from the fact that a market price generates revenue that is privately owned while a government price generates revenue that is commonly owned the claimants of revenue from a market price are generally well specified as is the extent of their claims this is not the case with revenue from a government price additional revenue raised by government typically goes into the general fund which is then allocated among rival claimants through competition for political influence even when government revenues are earmarked they are typically earmarked to a function where specific claimants are not well specified earmarking may reduce but surely does not eliminate the competition for political influence 2 competition for political influence requires the use of real resources and to a large extent represents pure waste since it is primarily concerned with distributing existing wealth rather than creating new wealth this waste is referred to as a rent seeking cost and has to be recognized as inextricably associated with government revenue although some of what is perceived as cost by rent seekers is from a social perspective a costless transfer the fact remains that raising government revenue with a user charge will motivate socially costly rent seeking and the amount of this cost will be positively related to the amount of revenue raised 3 one might argue that an increase in government revenue from a user charge may not result in additional rent seeking cost since total government revenue may remain constant as other charges or taxes are reduced even if this is the case however interest groups will compete to have their charges or taxes reduced

waiting line auctions if prizes are to be awarded simultaneously at a specified time on a first come first served basis then individuals who queue for them will choose different waiting times through their arrivals at the queue this choice of arrival time at a queue is similar to the choice of a sealed tender in an auction an equilibrium for this waiting line auction is obtained here using methods for analyzing sealed tender auctions when individuals are risk neutral it is shown that several alternative waiting line allocation procedures result in the same transactions cost associated with waiting in line

sustainable positive profit multiple price strategies in contestable markets abstract one of the most important features of contestable market is the incumbent s inability to react to entry while in the traditional literature this prevents the incumbent from earning positive profits in multiple price setting it allows him to make a binding commitment to maintain his strategy even if entry occurs it is shown that as a result of this pre commitment any natural monopolist can find a multiple price strategy that yields positive profit and prevents entry

patents learning by doing and market structure in the chemical processing industries for a sample of 24 chemical products count data models are used to evaluate firms propensity to patent and the link between patented process innovations and output prices the results show that process patenting was largely an outgrowth of learning by doing propensity to patent increased with firm size but decreased with market concentration reductions in output prices were strongly linked to learning by doing and more weakly to the rate of patenting producer firms appear to have been more successful than non producers in appropriating the value of patented process innovations

signaling through private equity placements and its impact on the valuation of biotechnology firms abstract this paper investigates how young publicly held technology firms contend with information asymmetry and the hazards it introduces to acquire the capital necessary for future growth we ascribe to the view that firms issuing private equity signal the marketplace that managers believe their growth opportunities are undervalued consistent with this view we find significant positive abnormal returns to announcements of private equity placements we develop theory suggesting that returns are determined by the timing of previous signals we also argue that the characteristics of the private placement signal specifically whether private equity is bundled with research partnerships influence the strength of the signal our results largely support our expectations

complementarity and cumulative learning effects in early diffusion of multiple technologies this paper concentrates on the contextual diffusion of flexible automation production and design engineering technologies in the italian metalworking industry the authors use duration data analysis with explanatory covariates to point out the role of complementarities between the technologies examined and learning by using effects matured with experience of previously available technologies in shaping diffusion paths the impact of industry and plant specific control variables as well as that of the stock of previous adopters on adoption probabilities is also taken into account in addition the authors analyze duration versus calendar time dependence of adoption probabilities copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

the risk concept for entrepreneurs reconsidered new challenges to the conventional wisdom abstract this paper explores the entrepreneurial risk construct focusing on how the decision to launch a new venture may entail risks different from what is found in established firms opportunities often emerge from the creation of specialized knowledge in start ups this knowledge is characterized by concerns for rent appropriation and information asymmetry we suggest that traditional measures of risk do not properly account for these concerns hence an illusion of greater risk taking attaches itself to entrepreneurs especially if the specialized knowledge is difficult to observe we suggest alternative measures that better capture these concerns including the dilution of control when issuing equity cash burn rates etc

strategic entry deterrence in analyzing deterrence of large scale entry two classes of entry barriers may be distinguished an innocent entry barrier is unintentionally erected as a side effect of innocent profit maximization in contrast a strategic entry barrier is purposely erected to reduce the possibility of entry two types of innocent barriers may also be distinguished a postentry absolute advantage has the property that if entry did occur the established firm would be at a profit advantage over the entrant examples are superior technology or product design patents and lower input prices a preentry asymmetry advantage arises from the fundamental preentry asymmetry between established firm and potential entrant before the entrant makes his entry decision the established firm has already committed resources this prior existence gives first move advantages the preentry asymmetry is independent of symmetry or asymmetry in the rules the equilibrium concept of the postentry game that might ensue even if the postentry game will be played according to nash cournot or entrant as leader rules the preentry leadership

what percentage of innovations are patented empirical estimates for european firms abstract a 1993 survey on the innovative activities of europe s largest industrial firms obtained useable results on patenting activities for 604 respondents the data are used to calculate the sales weighted propensity rates for 19 industries the propensity rates equal the percentage of innovations for which a patent application is made the propensity rates for product innovations average 35 9 varying between 8 1 in textiles and 79 2 in pharmaceuticals the average for process innovations is 24 8 varying from 8 1 in textiles to 46 8 for precision instruments only four sectors have patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations combined that exceed 50 pharmaceuticals chemicals machinery and precision instruments regression results that control for the effect of industry sector show that patent propensity rates increase with firm size and are higher among firms that find patents to be an important method for preventing competitors from copying both product and process innovations the effect of secrecy is not so straightforward firms that find secrecy to be an important protection method for product innovations are less likely to patent as expected but secrecy has little effect on the propensity to patent process innovations the r d intensity of the firm has no effect on patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations the sector of activity has a strong influence on product patent propensities but very little effect on process patent propensities after controlling for the effect of other factors

beyond baseline and follow up the case for more t in experiments the vast majority of randomized experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and single follow up survey if multiple follow ups are conducted the reason is typically to examine the trajectory of impact effects so that in effect only one follow up round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of interest while such a design is suitable for study of highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured outcomes in the health and education domains this paper makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes such as business profits household incomes and expenditures and episodic health outcomes taking multiple measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals allows the researcher to average out noise increasing power when the outcomes have low autocorrelation it can make sense to do no baseline at all moreover the author shows how for such outcomes more power can be achieved with multiple follow ups than allocating the same total sample size over a single follow up and baseline the analysis highlights the large gains in power from ancova rather than difference in differences when autocorrelations are low and a baseline is taken the paper discusses the issues involved in multiple measurements and makes recommendations for the design of experiments and related non experimental impact evaluations

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure presents a transcript of the presidential address delivered at the 94th meeting of the american economic association on december 29 1981 discussion of developments in the theory of industry structure welfare attributes of contestable markets behavior characteristics of oligopoly equilibrium intertemporal vulnerability to inefficient entry ebsco

leveraging research and development assessing the impact of the u s advanced technology program this paper examines the factors that affect a firm s chances of winning an award from the advanced technology program atp and the subsequent impact of the award on a firm s success in raising additional funds for its research and development rd the halo effect from the award increases the success of these firms in attracting additional funding from other sources our conclusion is that the atp is leveraging activities that have a strong potential for broad based economic benefit

complementarities between obstacles to innovation evidence from france abstract this paper investigates obstacles to innovation faced by french manufacturing firms using cis2 data we distinguish between obstacles in postponed projects and obstacles in abandoned projects first we highlight the most important barriers to innovation faced by firms and find that lack of skilled personnel is one of these second based on descriptive analysis correspondence analysis and multivariate probit models we explore factors explaining the perception of obstacles and study complementarities between those obstacles we show that while adopting a package of policies increases the pace of innovation a more targeted choice among policies is needed to encourage firms to persevere in their innovative efforts

vocational training programs and youth labor market outcomes evidence from nepal abstract lack of skills is arguably one of the most important determinants of high levels of unemployment and poverty in response policymakers often initiate vocational training programs in effort to enhance skill formation among the youth using a regression discontinuity design we examine a large youth training intervention in nepal we find twelve months after the start of the training program that the intervention generated an increase in non farm employment of 10 percentage points itt estimates and up to 31 percentage points for program compliers late estimates we also detect sizeable gains in monthly earnings women who start self employment activities inside their homes largely drive these impacts we argue that low baseline educational levels and non farm employment levels and nepal s social and cultural norms towards women drive our large program impacts our results suggest that the program enables otherwise underemployed women to earn an income while staying at home close to household errands and in line with the socio cultural norms that prevent them from taking up employment outside the house

innovation without patents evidence from world s fairs abstractthis paper introduces a unique historical data set of more than 8 000 british and american innovations at world s fairs between 1851 and 1915 to explore the relationship between patents and innovations the data indicate that the majority of innovations 89 percent of british exhibits in 1851 were not patented comparisons across british and u s data also show that patenting decisions were unresponsive to differences in patent laws cross sectional evidence suggests that high quality and urban exhibits were more likely to be patented the most significant differences however occurred across industries inventors were most likely to use patents in industries in which innovations are easy to reverse engineer and secrecy is ineffective relative to patents in the late nineteenth century scientific breakthroughs including the publication of the periodic table reduced the effectiveness of secrecy in the chemical industry difference in differences regressions suggest that this change resulted in a

recent trends in income inequality in latin america this paper documents patterns and recent developments on income inequality in latin america la new comparative international evidence confirms that la is a region of high inequality although maybe not the highest in the world income inequality has fallen in the 2000s suggesting a turning point from the substantial increases of the 1980s and 1990s the fall in inequality is significant and widespread but it does not seem to be based on strong fundamentals

unintentional unavoidable and beneficial knowledge leakage from the multinational enterprise knowledge leakage as an undesirable outcome for mnes is an accepted view in ib literature we challenge this view and argue that knowledge leakage is often unintentional unavoidable and beneficial for the mne in a highly networked and information rich society knowledge leakage from mnes 1 happens naturally due to interfirm relationships interactions and socialization 2 is unavoidable due to employee mobility and 3 facilitates knowledge inflows due to the reciprocity nature of knowledge exchange and hence is beneficial for mnes in addition the costs of protecting knowledge incurred by an mne will often outweigh the benefits

on limiting or encouraging rivalry in technical progress the effect of patent scope decisions abstract this essay is on the effects of the scope of a patent e g how broad its allowed claims on subsequent inventing in a field it is argued that this depends on the topography of technical advance in a field in particular on how inventions are linked to each other and in the extent to which rapid technical advance requires a diversity of actors and minds as contrasted with being facilitated by express coordination of inventive activity technical advance is examined in several different fields with a focus on how patents influenced the pace and quality of development the authors conclude that allowing and enforcing broad patent claims tends to hinder technical progress

licensing the market for technology abstract in technology based industries incumbent firms often license their technology to potential competitors such a strategy is difficult to explain within traditional models of licensing this paper extends the literature on licensing by relaxing the assumption of a monopolist technology holder competition in the market for technology induces licensing of innovations and incumbent firms may find it privately profitable to license although their joint profits may well be higher in the absence of any licensing a strong testable implication of our model is that the number of licenses per patent holder decreases with the degree of product differentiation

how to license intangible property we examine the optimal licensing strategy of a research lab selling to firms who are product market competitors we consider an independent lab as well as a research joint venture we show that 1 demands are interdependent and hence the standard price mechanism is not the profit maximizing licensing strategy 2 the seller s incentives to develop the innovation may be excessive 3 the seller s incentives to disseminate the innovation typically are too low 4 larger ventures are less likely to develop the innovation and more likely to restrict its dissemination in those cases where development occurs and 5 a downstream firm that is not a member of the research venture is worse off as a result of the innovation

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

contracting for tacit knowledge the provision of technical services in technology licensing contracts abstract recent research on the economic payoff from new technology has emphasized the importance of tacit knowledge or know how this paper shows that arm s length contract can overcome the problems in contracting for know how by bundling complementary inputs with know how in a technology package and leveraging the superior enforceability of contracts over the latter in the empirical part of this paper the relationship between bundling and transfer of know how is analyzed using indian data the results imply that tied sales of inputs may increase the efficiency of contracts involving the transfer of know how a striking result in the context of the current north south debates on intellectual property rights is the packaging of patents with know how

novelty and disclosure in patent law the stringency of the novelty requirement in patent law affects the pace of innovation because it affects the amount of technical information that is disclosed among firms it also affects ex ante profitability of research we compare weak and strong novelty requirements from the standpoint of social efficiency we ask how our answer depends on the rule that determines which firm gets a patent when two firms have patents pending on the same technology the possible rules are first to invent which applies in the u s and first to file which applies everywhere else

the impact of vocational training for the unemployed experimental evidence from turkey this brief summarizes the updates from the 2014 paper entitled the impact of vocational training for the unemployed experimental evidence from turkey conducted between between 2010 and 2011 in turkey a randomized experiment is used to evaluate a large scale active labor market policy turkey s vocational training programs for the unemployed a detailed follow up survey of a large sample with low attrition enables precise estimation of treatment impacts and their heterogeneity the average impact of training on employment is positive but close to zero and statistically insignificant which is much lower than either program officials or applicants expected over the first year after training the paper finds that training had statistically significant effects on the quality of employment and that the positive impacts are stronger when training is offered by private providers however longer term administrative data show that after three years these effects have also dissipated

licensing radical product innovations to speed up the diffusion abstract we present a differential game to study how companies can simultaneously license their innovations to other firms when launching a new product the licensee may cannibalize licensor s sales albeit this can be compensated by gains from royalties nonetheless patent royalties are generally so low that licensing is not an attractive strategy in this paper we consider the role of licensing to speed up the product diffusion word of mouth by licensee s customers and licensee s advertising indirectly push forward sales of the licensing company accelerating new product diffusion we find evidence that licensing can be a potentially profitable strategy however we also find that a weak intellectual property right ipr protection can easily diminish the financial attractiveness of licensing

the paradox of openness appropriability external search and collaboration a b s t r a c t to innovate firms often need to draw from and collaborate with a large number of actors from outside their organization at the same time firms need also to be focused on capturing the returns from their innovative ideas this gives rise to a paradox of openness the creation of innovations often requires openness but the commercialization of innovations requires protection based on econometric analysis of data from a uk innovation survey we find a concave relationship between firms breadth of external search and formal collaboration for innovation and the strength of the firms appropriability strategies we show that this concave relationship is stronger for breadth of formal collaboration than for external search there is also partial evidence suggesting that the relationship is less pronounced for both external search and formal collaboration if firms do not draw ideas from or collaborate with competitors we explore the implications of these findings for the literature on open innovation and innovation strategy 2013 the authors published by elsevier b v all rights reserved

french firms strategies for protecting their intellectual property in attempting to protect their innovations firms can choose from a range of mechanisms which may be either non statutory trade secrets design complexity and lead time advantage over competitors or statutory patent design registration trademark copyright yet little is known about how firms do actually make their choices from among these different appropriability mechanisms the aim of this paper is to determine how french firms use of intellectual property protection mechanisms relates to the type of innovation the characteristics of the market sector in which they operate the firms characteristics and their human resources strategies our empirical model draws on four french databases covering the period 2001 2004 our results show that the choice of a means of protection matters and emerges out of a complex strategy our results also reveal that the different statutory and non statutory means of protection are complementary within their own categories but hardly so between categories

the anatomy of industry r d intensity distributions using firm data disaggregated by industry we establish a set of regularities in the distribution of firm r d intensities within manufacturing industries we show how a simple probabilistic process in which chance influences a key unobserved determinant of r d and firm size conditions the returns to r d can account for these regularities and other features of the distributions the model provides a unified noncausal explanation of a series of long observed relationships across mean r d intensity market concentration and the coefficient of variation it also offers a novel explanation for the inverse relationship between r d productivity and firm size jel 031