performance rating and yardstick competition in social service provision abstract this paper investigates whether national evaluation of decentralised government performance tends by lessening local information spill overs to reduce the scope for local performance comparisons and consequently to lower the extent of spatial auto correlation among local government expenditures it analyses local government expenditures on personal social services in the uk before and after the introduction of a national performance assessment system sspr social services performance rating that would attribute a rating to each local authority the empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the sspr has reduced local yardstick competition

local government efficiency determinants and spatial interdependence we analyse the determinants of local government efficiency taking into account the presence of spatial interactions among neighbouring municipalities to do so first we estimate an efficiency inde

the rise of intra occupational wage inequality in the united states 1983 to 2002 wage inequality has increased dramatically in the united states since the 1980s this article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three digit level using the current population survey from 1983 to 2002 we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within occupational inequality grew faster than betweenoccupational inequality we estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period the results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intraoccupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data these findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market correspondingly a more comprehensive approach one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the new economy is warranted

persistence of innovative activities sectoral patterns of innovation and international technological specialization abstract in this paper we focus on the role of persistence and heterogeneity of innovative activities at the level of the firm in determining the patterns of technological change in different industries and countries we ask are persistence and heterogeneity associated with higher degrees of concentration in innovative activities stability in the ranking of innovators and lower degrees of entry and exit in the population of innovators or do the patterns of innovation depend on other variables like firm size and industrial concentration moreover what are the relationships between the patterns of innovative activities their determinants and the technological specialization of countries we compute indicators of persistence and heterogeneity using the otaf spru patent database at the firm level for five european countries over the period 1969 1986 for 33 technological classes then we estimate the relationships between our indicators of the sectoral patterns of innovative activities and international technological specialization on the one hand and our indicators of persistence heterogeneity and market structure on the other results show that persistence and asymmetries are important and strongly related phenomena that affect the patterns of innovative activities across countries and sectors while the role of market structure variables is less clear finally international technological specialization is associated to a competitive core of persistent innovators

value for money german local government efficiency in a comparative perspective in this article we investigate the cost efficiency of german local governments in the state of baden wurttemberg in 2004 using a stochastic frontier approach besides being the first study on german data we add two elements to the literature first we provide a comparative perspective allowing us to embed our results in the broader literature second unlike most previous studies we explicitly account for exogenous or nondiscretionary influences when estimating municipal efficiency scores the results suggest that disregarding such exogenous factors can lead to significant and systematic bias in the estimated inefficiency levels particularly underestimation of efficiency occurs for municipalities with high tourist activity while the reverse is true for municipalities with high unemployment

asset stock accumulation and sustainability of competitive advantage given incomplete factor markets appropriate time paths of flow variables must be chosen to build required stocks of assets that is critical resources are accumulated rather than acquired in strategic factor markets barney barney j 1986 strategic factor markets expectations luck and business strategy management sci october 1231 1241 sustainability of a firm s asset position hinges on how easily assets can be substituted or imitated imitability is linked to the characteristics of the asset accumulation process time compression diseconomies asset mass efficiencies inter connectedness asset erosion and causal ambiguity

evidence on the volunteer labor supply of married women 1 introduction in this paper i investigate the volunteer labor supply of married women there are dozens of studies that examine the labor supply of married women and a smaller number that investigate the supply of volunteer labor in general as far as i know there are none that have focused on the supply of volunteer labor by married women i analyze time diary data for the 1970s to consider one main question and three subsidiary questions i what was the direct effect of economic variables after tax wage rate and other income on married women s volunteering both participation and hours ii does the number of children in the family influence the volunteering of married women to the extent that rising wages may induce smaller family size is this an indirect channel that reduces volunteering if one of the motivations for volunteering is to increase the quantity or quality of activities for one s own children the 1970s is an especially interesting time period to examine in the united states as that was the decade that saw the first large increases in married women s labor force participation rates iii are time and donations substitutes or complements for married women iv do the data support the brown and lankford 1992 modeling conjecture concerning a sequence of time allocation decisions as opposed to the gronau model of household time allocation where such decisions are made simultaneously gronau 1986 i find that i the volunteer labor supply for married women is positively sloped and inelastic with an estimated wage elasticity of 0 64 rises in the net wage have a small negative effect on married women s participation in volunteer activities a 25 rise in the net wage is associated with a 1 drop in the probability of volunteering there is a small negative other income from assets and husband s earnings elasticity of volunteer labor supply 0 09 so other sources of income mattered for married women s volunteering in the 1970s the effect of other income on married women s volunteer participation is positive ii having more children increases the probability of volunteering but reduces the number of hours volunteered iii donations of time and money appear to be substitutes overall the elasticity of married women s volunteer hours with respect to the tax price of giving is greater than two the participation effect is again negative this result is tentative because the data are not based on tax return information and i lack good information on cash donations iv there is mixed support for the brown and lankford conjecture the finding of a positive wage elasticity of volunteer labor supply is at odds with the opportunity cost of time interpretation of the wage especially as the finding for other income is also negative implying that volunteer hours are an inferior good substitution and income effects would therefore both be in a negative direction as the net wage rises the results with the sequential specification are sensible and easily interpreted but the key parameter estimate does not quite meet conventional standards of statistical significance increased hours of work decrease married women s participation and hours an added test of the sequential model is less favorable the wage findings suggest that rising wages for women caused a reduced incidence of volunteering among married women but if anything increased the hours of volunteering one possible vehicle for this would be the entry of women into professional careers where volunteering is a normal part of the career another possible explanation is that married women with a loose attachment to volunteering stopped volunteering and those married women with greater attachment to volunteering increased their hours commitments to offset the participation effect the link between children and volunteering is important as an indicator of how much selfinterest is involved in volunteering for example school volunteering may be a way of providing enhanced investment in one s own children where the benefit to others is a by product

income distribution human capital and economic growth in colombia abstract colombian income distribution has followed a clear path during the last two decades in the second half of the 1970s human capital accumulation reduced the dispersion of income distribution and lead to a period of stagnation between 1983 and 1990 when mobility declined after the structural reforms a skill bias technological change the wage differential for skilled workers increased inequality by a polarization in the bi modal distribution of income these topics are discussed in the paper along some dynamic aspects of income and educational mobility in colombia

distributive shares in the us economy 1964 2001 specifying the labour theory of value in a way that distinguishes both productive from unproductive labour and production workers from supervisory workers this paper considers distributive shares in the us economy between 1964 and 2001 trends in productive and unproductive labour are explored in full time equivalents hours and money after 1979 there was a large shift of money value not matched by a shift in either hours or employment from the wages paid to productive labour to those paid to supervisory labour since the wage share in money value added of non supervisory labour in unproductive sectors was approximately constant the 1980s and 1990s also saw the profits share squeezed by the rising wage share of supervisory workers some implications of this are explored in the construction of a class rather than a factor approach to distributive shares

citizen coproduction and efficient public good provision theory and evidence from local public libraries abstract in both public administration and economics efficiency is brought forward as an important criterion for evaluating administrative actions clearly its value as an assessment principle depends on our ability to adequately measure efficiency this article argues that citizen s coproduction in public services requires a careful reassessment of how we approach the measurement of productive efficiency in public service delivery theoretically we illustrate that using observable outcomes e g library circulation school results health outcomes fires extinguished and crimes solved as output indicators is inappropriate and leads to biased estimates of public service providers productive efficiency this bias arises because citizens co determine final outputs leaving them at least partly beyond the service providers control empirically we find supportive evidence of both the existence and importance of such demand induced bias

patterns of technological competence accumulation a proposition for empirical measurement this article develops a typology that describes and measures different types of technological competence accumulation the notion of accumulation comprises not only the state but also the change in competence and hence it complies with the criticism of the static approaches to competence management the typology of competence accumulation enables a comparison of firm profiles that lead to identification of four groups of firm behavior across the telecommunications industry the relationship between the firm and the industry level is established on the condition that each firm s competence level depends on the firms mutual relationships with other firms in the same industry known as red queen evolution the four groups of firm behaviour are therefore not considered as groups of independent firms that are similar by coincidence but as patterns of behavior within the telecommunications industry which allows for a discussion of more general implications for management of technology copyright 2005 oxford university press

on the determinants of local government performance a two stage nonparametric approach abstract this article analyzes the efficiency of local governments in the comunitat valenciana spain and their main explanatory variables the analysis is performed in two stages firstly efficiency is measured via nonparametric activity analysis techniques specifically we consider both data envelopment analysis dea and free disposable hull fdh techniques the second stage identifies some critical determinants of efficiency focusing on both political and fiscal policy variables in contrast to previous two stage research studies our approach performs the latter attempt via nonparametric smoothing techniques rather than econometric methods such as ols or tobit related techniques results show that efficiency scores especially under the nonconvexity assumption fdh are higher for large municipalities thus there is empirical evidence to suggest that resources may be better allocated by large municipalities however the inefficiency found is not entirely attributable to poor management as second stage analysis reveals both fiscal and political variables to be explicably related to municipality performance moreover the explanatory variables impact on efficiency is robust to the chosen technique either convex dea or nonconvex fdh

the public sector and convergence with spatial interdependence empirical evidence from spain abstractwe propose a framework to analyse convergence between regions incorporating the public sector and technological knowledge spillovers in the context of a neoclassical growth model second we apply novel estimation methods pertaining to the spatial econometrics literature introducing a spatial durbin panel data model based on instrumental variables and maximum likelihood estimation our model makes it possible to analyse in terms of convergence the results obtained in spanish regions with the policies implemented during the period 1980 2011 the results support the idea that education and fiscal policies have a positive effect on regional development and cohesion therefore we can conclude that it is possible to obtain better results for regional convergence with higher rates of public investment in education and tax revenues we also obtain interesting results that confirm the existence of spillover effects in economic growth and public policies identifying their magnitude and significance

competition in the political arena and local government performance competition reduces rent extraction in private sector firms in this article we empirically assess whether it similarly disciplines politicians by evaluating local level governments performance in flanders the results indicate that electoral competition measured via the number of parties competing in elections significantly positively affects the productive efficiency of municipal policy intertemporal competition measured as the volatility of election outcomes over time has a similar but weaker positive effect these beneficial effects are mitigated by the fact that competition may lead to more fragmented governments which is shown to work against their productive efficiency overall though the beneficial effects outweigh the unfavourable ones in our sample

the dynamic capabilities of firms an introduction an expanded paradigm is needed to explain how competitive advantage is gained and held firms resorting to resource bas ed strategy attempt to accumulate valuable technology assets and employ an aggressive intellectual property stance however winners in the global marketplace have been firms demonstrating timely responsiveness and rapid and flexible product innovation along with the management capability to effectively coordinate and redeploy internal and external competences this source of competitive advantage dynamic capabilities emphasizes two aspects first it refers to the shifting character of the environment second it emphasizes the key role of strategic management in appropriately adapting integrating and re configuring internal and external organizational skills resources and functional competences toward changing environment 3 only recently have researchers begun to focus on the specifics of developing firm specific capabilities and the manner in which competences are renewed to respond to shifts in the business environment the dynamic capabilities approach provides a coherent framework to integrate existing conceptual and empirical knowledge and facilitate prescription this paper argues that the competitive advanis tage of firms stems from dynamic capabilities rooted in high performance routines z operating inside the firm embedded in the firm s processes and conditioned by its history it offers dynamic capabilities as an emerging paradigm of the modern business j firm that draws on multiple disciplines and advances with the help of industry studies in the usa and elsewhere

inequality income growth and mobility the basic facts during the 1950s and 1960s mean wages in the united states grew rapidly and the dispersion around this growing mean changed very litde starting in the 1970s and continuing into the 1980s and 1990s these patterns were reversed mean wages grew slowly and inequality increased rapidly these changes in labor markets were reflected in changes in the distribution of family income the mean of the distribution of family income did increase after 1973 in spite of the near constancy of mean real wages as family members increased the number of hours they worked however the increase in inequality of wages was mirrored by an increase in the dispersion of family income a large descriptive literature has documented the rise in inequality while a smaller behavioral literature has sought to delineate the causes of this rise these changes in the distribution of family income a fected rates of poverty directly during the 1950s and 1960s temporary increases in poverty during recessions were more than offset by declines in poverty during economic expansions as long as the poor gained along with everyone else fi om the secular growth in the mean one could be confident that poverty rates would ratchet down this is exactly what happened as poverty rates fell from 22 4 percent in 1959 to 11 1 percent in 1973

computerisation and wage dispersion an analytical reinterpretation the rich countries have recently seen a dramatic rise in income inequality all the more surprising because the long term trend had been toward equality this paper examines one of the leading explanations computerisation in the workplace i offer a theory of computers impact on white collar work which goes far toward explaining the timing form and locus of recent labour market changes the theory looks at the bureaucratic and organisational applications of computers that have been first largest and most influential they have two effects on firms demand for labour at different skill levels

the public pay gap in britain small differences that don t matter the existing literature on inequality between private and public sectors focuses on cross section differences in earnings levels forward looking agents however care about income and job mobility too which we show are substantially different between the two sectors using data from the bhps we estimate a model of income and employment dynamics allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in the propensity to be employed in eitherjob sector we detect a positive average public premium both in income flows and in the present discounted sum of future income flows we also find that income inequality is lower but more persistent in the public sector there is an ongoing debate as to whether public sector workers experience better or worse pay conditions than their private counterparts a recurring message in the recent literature is that although raw differences can be large most are likely to reflect differences in the composition of the workforce both in terms of observed characteristics such as age and education and in terms of unobserved characteristics nevertheless a look at labour markets in the two sectors suggests that individuals do perceive some differences between the sectors katz and krueger 1991 document the fact that blue collar workers are willing to queue to obtain public sector jobs whereas highlyskilled workers are notoriously hard to recruit and retain in the public sector the focus of most of the literature on public pay gaps is on cross section differences in earnings levels 2 yet the public private differences are arguably equally marked in terms of income mobility income volatility and job loss risk than in terms of mean income levels public sector employers are widely perceived to offer more job security 3 there is also plentiful evidence of relative wage compression in the public sector moreover as we shall point out public sector incomes are substantially more persistent over time than private sector incomes the motivating point of this article is that forward looking agents are likely to care about income and job mobility as well as income levels so that a more general assessment of the existence and magnitude of a public premium should be based on

non parametric analysis of multi output production with joint inputs we focus on analysing cost minimising production behaviour in multi output settings we distinguish between two approaches for modelling the use of joint inputs the cooperative approach assumes cost minimisation at the aggregate firm level while the non cooperative approach assumes cost minimisation at the level of the individual output division our framework extends the existing non parametric framework for analysing single output production an empirical application to the english and welsh drinking water and sewerage sector shows the practical usefulness of our framework specifically we compare the empirical validity of the cooperative and non cooperative models for describing the observed production behaviour

on the sources and significance of interindustry differences in technological opportunities abstract the set of technological opportunities in a given industry is one of the fundamental determinants of technical advance in that line of business we examine the concept of technological opportunity and discuss three categories of sources of those opportunities advances in scientific understanding and technique technological advances originating in other industries and in other private and governmental institutions and feedbacks from an industry s own technological advances data from the yale survey on industrial research and development are used to measure the strength of various sources of technological opportunity and to discern interindustry differences in the importance of these sources we find that interindustry differences in the strength and sources of technological opportunities contribute importantly to explanations of cross industry variation in r d intensity and technological advance

expenditure spillovers and fiscal interactions empirical evidence from local governments in spain abstract the paper presents a framework for measuring spillovers resulting from local expenditure policies we identify and test for two different types of expenditure spillovers i benefit spillovers arising from the provision of local public goods and ii crowding spillovers arising from the crowding of facilities by residents in neighboring jurisdictions benefit spillovers are accounted for by assuming that the representative resident enjoys the consumption of a local public good in both his own community and in those surrounding it crowding spillovers are included by considering that a locality s consumption level is influenced by the population living in the surrounding localities we estimate a reaction function with interactions between local governments occurring not only between expenditure levels but also between neighbors populations and expenditures the equation is estimated using data on more than 2500 spanish local governments for the year 1999 the results show that both types of spillovers are relevant

the nature and importance of economic competence this chapter takes on three tasks 1 to survey the study of economic competence as it appears in economic literature 2 to give a meaningful and operational definition of economic competence as one of the factors contributing to macroeconomic growth and 3 to suggest a methodology pursued in greater depth elsewhere to generalize and link economic competence as defined at the micro firm individual level to macroeconomic growth through simulation on the micro based macroeconomic model of the swedish economic system moses by introducing knowledge in the micro setting of firm organizational competence we arrive at a very different interpretation measured at the macro industry level from that of standard neoclassical theory

zipf s law for cities an explanation zipf s law is a very tight constraint on the class of admissible models of local growth it says that for most countries the size distribution of cities strikingly fits a power law the number of cities with populations greater than s is proportional to 1 s suppose that at least in the upper tail all cities follow some proportional growth process this appears to be verified empirically this automatically leads their distribution to converge to zipf s law

the interactions of organizational and competitive influences on strategy and performance despite much debate in the strategy literatures there is little consensus as to whether organizational capabilities or market competition are more important in shaping firms actions and performance we suspect that simply comparing firm level and industry level influences will continue to prove fruitless for two reasons in the first place both organization and competition are clearly important in shaping strategy and performance in the second place we suspect that the inconclusive nature of much of the existing research reflects the fact that organizational capabilities competition strategy and performance are fundamentally endogenous that is reciprocal interactions at multiple levels of analysis between the environment and the firm shape business strategy and performance while interactions between strategy and performance in turn shape both organizational capabilities and competitive environments this special issue of the strategic management journal includes papers that focus attention on several dimensions of these interactions a common theme emerges from the work concerning the sequential nature of the interrelationships the papers suggest that firms develop organizational capabilities as they act in competitive institutional and cognitive environments where capabilities arise both by design and as the unexpected by products of firm actions the capabilities managers understanding of the capabilities and the historical context that surrounds them then condition firms reactions to changes in their environment the reactions and firm performance in turn affect the structure of the industry and all these changes generate new information which in turn creates new learning opportunities thus the papers view strategy and performance as an ongoing sequence of capabilities conditioned adaptations by firms which in turn become exogenous events in the environments of the managers of other firms for strategy researchers the important question is not that of which disciplinary perspective or mode of explanation is a more appropriate one but rather that of the conditions under which a given mode of explanation is most appropriate 1997 by john wiley sons ltd

road tax interactions among local governments a spatial panel data analysis of the french case over the period 1984 2000 abstractthis article contributes to the literature on local tax interactions its novelty lies in its focus on the interactions of local governments via an indirect local tax on vehicles such as th

revealed yardstick competition local government efficiency patterns in norway this paper investigates whether the production efficiency of norwegian local governments exhibits a spatial pattern that is compatible with the hypothesis of yardstick competition in order to check whether yardstick competition is really responsible for the observed spatial pattern and rule out alternative theoretical explanations the paper exploits unique information from a survey on local politicians attitudes towards comparative evaluation of local bureaus performances against other jurisdictions benchmarking merging the latter information with the observed interdependence in efficiency the paper provides evidence that comparative performance evaluation generates positive spatial auto correlation in local efficiency indicators

intergroup economic inequality in south africa the post apartheid era one of the most pressing challenges facing the south african government is how to expand the overall opportunity set for nonwhites who have been historically disadvantaged by apartheid this is perhaps best accomplished by expanding employment opportunities within the economy general employment expansion mnust be accomplished keeping in mind the urgent need to radically expand nonwhite employment employment and unemployment statistics are difficult to interpret but there is a general sense that the unemployment situation especially for nonwhites is extremely bad in dealing with employment issues two concerns must be faced both are legacies of the apartheid era the first is related to differences in educational attainment across racial groups during apartheid the bantu education policy was designed to suppress the educational attainment of africans blacks relative to whites however educational opportunities for coloureds mixed race and asians primarily indian were also depressed relative to whites the second concern is that labor market discrimination could be used either to exclude nonwhites for employment consideration or to limit their wages and opportunities once they are employed for policy reasons it is imperative to understand the extent to which premarket or market factors operate to limit opportunities for nonwhites given the institutionalized nature of apartheid segregation one can imagine three scenarios earnings differences could be the result entirely of premarket factors such as education differences alternatively earnings differences could be the result of labor market practices that limit one group s eamings relative to another s a third scenario a synthesis of the former two would find earnings differences to be the result of a combination of premarket differentials and in market discrimination to address premarket discrimination policy would focus entirely on leveling funding and increasing access to educational opportunities for historically disadvantaged groups however legislative forms such as affirmative action would be required to remedy exclusively labormarket discrimination a combination of these policies would be required to deal with the third scenario understanding the relative importance of these factors is important when resource allocation is considered this paper concerns itself with measuring income losses to nonwhites from labor market discrimination to evaluate the extent of labor market discrimination ordinary least squares ols estimates of earnings equations are evaluated for males in each population group observed wage differentials are decomposed into a component attributable to human capital differences while a residual is attributed to labor markelt discrimination these findings are then contrasted to those of others to give a sense of the trend in market discrimination in south africa

twenty years of rising inequality in u s lifetime labour income values in this paper we study the evolution of lifetime labour income inequality by constructing present value life cycle measures that incorporate both earnings and employment risk we find that even though lifetime income inequality is 40 less than earnings inequality the total increase in lifetime income inequality over the past 20 years is the same as earnings inequality while the total increase is the same the pathways there differ with earnings inequality experiencing a steady increase and lifetime income inequality increasing in spurts particularly in the latter half of the 1990s finally we find the changes in lifetime income inequality are primarily driven by changes in earnings mobility and changes in the earnings distribution itself changes in employment risk and the composition of the sample such as the shift toward attaining more education and the ageing population do not play a large role 2004 the review of economics studies limited

earnings mobility in times of growth and decline argentina from 1996 to 2003 summary in recent years argentina s economy has experienced both rapid growth and severe decline in this paper we use a series of one year long panels to study who gained the most in pesos when the economy grew and who lost the most in pesos when the economy contracted various considerations led us to expect that mobility would be divergent that is that the individuals who started with the highest initial earnings would enjoy the largest earnings gains in pesos contrary to expectations and for a wide range of specifications mobility is found to be mostly convergent sometimes neutral and never divergent

short and long term evaluation of efficiency and quality an application to spanish municipalities this article analyses efficiency and quality levels in spanish local governments and their determining factors through the application of the data envelopment analysis methodology it aims to discover to what extent inefficiency arises from both quality considerations and external factors beyond the organization s control or alternatively how much inefficiency is due to inadequate resource management as a component of inadequate resource management we test the existence of political budgetary cycles in the temporal evolution of inefficiencies the results show that on the whole there is still a wide margin within which local government efficiency and quality levels could be increased although it is revealed that a great deal of inefficiency is due to exogenous or noncontrollable factors in particular it has been found that the size of the municipality the per capita tax revenue the per capita grants and the amount of commercial activity are some of the factors related with local government effici

the red queen in organizational creation and development we synthesize organization learning theory and organizational ecology to predict systematic patterns in the founding and growth of organizations over time our central argument is that competition triggers organizational learning which in turn intensifies competition that again triggers an adaptive response we model this self exciting dynamic sometimes referred to as the red queen in general evolutionary theory to explain organizational founding and growth rates among the thousands of retail banks that have operated in illinois at any time from 1900 1993 we find strong evidence that red queen evolution led some organizations to grow quickly and to place strong competitive pressure on rivals red queen evolution also helped establish barriers to entry however this same evolutionary process appears to make organizations more susceptible to competency traps ultimately slowing their growth rates and inviting new market entry organizations confronted by a widely varying distribution of competitors grow more slowly and are more likely to face new entrants overall the results suggest that processes of organizational creation and growth emerge from ecologies of learning organizations more generally we discuss the use of ecological theory and models to study the empirical consequences of organizational learning opyright 2002 oxford university press

dynamic capabilities what are they this paper focuses on dynamic capabilities and more generally the resource based view of the firm we argue that dynamic capabilities are a set of specific and identifiable processes such as product development strategic decision making and alliancing they are neither vague nor tautological although dynamic capabilities are idiosyncratic in their details and path dependent in their emergence they have significant commonalities across firms popularly termed best practice this suggests that they are more homogeneous fungible equifinal and substitutable than is usually assumed in moderately dynamic markets dynamic capabilities resemble the traditional conception of routines they are detailed analytic stable processes with predictable outcomes in contrast in high velocity markets they are simple highly experiential and fragile processes with unpredictable outcomes finally well known learning mechanisms guide the evolution of dynamic capabilities in moderately dynamic markets the evolutionary emphasis is on variation in high velocity markets it is on selection at the level of rbv we conclude that traditional rbv misidentifies the locus of long term competitive advantage in dynamic markets overemphasizes the strategic logic of leverage and reaches a boundary condition in high velocity markets copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

strategic fiscal interaction across borders evidence from french and german local governments along the rhine valley abstract this article contributes to the literature on local tax interactions its novelty lies in its focus on the interactions of local governments across national borders we use panel data for the french and german municipalities in the rhine valley for the period 2000 2007 the local governments of each country influence firms overall tax burdens but the tax instruments available at the local level differ we estimate panel models that distinguish between the effects of competing municipalities belonging to the same country and belonging to the other country our empirical model shows that local jurisdictions along borders choose their business tax rates based on those of their domestic neighbors and that foreign fiscal policy does not have an impact on the local domestic tax setting behavior in these contexts

public spending interactions and local politics empirical evidence from french municipalities this paper aims at testing whether there exist spending interactions between french municipalities by estimating a dynamic panel data model our results suggest that there are some interactions between neighbouring municipalities as regards primary and investment expenditures a positive relationship between municipalities wage bill and un employment rates is likely to stress a rise of temporary employment in those municipalities that suffer from social troubles further the estimation results show that these interdepen dences also exist between cities whose mayors have the same partisan affiliation finally our results confirm the opportunistic behaviour of local governments which increase all categories of public spending in pre electoral periods

an international comparison of lifetime inequality how continental europe resembles north america we compare earnings inequality and mobility across the united states canada france germany and the united kingdom during the late 1990s a flexible model of earnings dynamics that isolates positional mobility within a stable earnings distribution is estimated earnings trajectories are then simulated and lifetime annuity value distributions are constructed earnings mobility and employment risk are found to be positively correlated with base year inequality taken together they produce more equalization in countries with high cross section inequality such that the countries in our sample have more similar lifetime inequality levels than cross section measures suggest

developing by borrowing inter jurisdictional competition land finance and local debt accumulation in china although the investment oriented development model for economic growth adopted by chinese governments has generated spectacular results the risks of debt financed urbanisation and economic development have recently become evident in mounting local debts that are undermining the financial system triggering concerns with respect to local governments indebtedness financial stability and sovereign risk in china in this paper we portray the uneven spatial and temporal dynamics of local government debt in china and examine the ways in which it is intertwined with institutional political and economic factors our analysis shows that while global and national economic conditions have resulted in a dramatic increase in local government debt particularly in the late 2000s and the early 2010s the spatial variation of local debt accumulation in china could be partly explained by two institutional factors land finance and inter jurisdictional competition we argue that the behaviour of local governments may

public sector efficiency the roles of political and budgetary institutions fiscal capacity and democratic participation the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether efficiency in public service provision is affected by political and budgetary institutions fiscal capacity and democratic participation in order to address this issue we take advantage of a new global efficiency measure for norwegian local governments we find that high fiscal capacity and a high degree of party fragmentation contribute to low efficiency in addition there is some evidence that democratic participation increases efficiency while a centralized top down budgetary procedure is associated with low efficiency

learning about the prospects for mobility economic and political dynamics following fundamental policy reform abstract the political left turn in latin america which lagged its transition to liberalized market economies by a decade or more challenges conventional economic explanations of voting behavior this paper generalizes the forward looking voter model to a broad range of dynamic possibly non concave income processes under full information the model implies support for redistributive policies materializes rapidly if few prospects of upward mobility are present in contrast modeling voters evolving beliefs about an unknown income dynamic process shows a slow and polarizing shift toward redistributive preferences simulation using fitted income dynamics suggests that this imperfect information perspective accounts for latin america s right to left political shift and offers additional insights about political dynamics in the face of economic polarization

asset profiles for technological innovation abstract this paper proposes a conceptual distinction between four generic categories of assets for technological innovation 1 scientific research assets 2 process innovative assets 3 product innovative application assets and 4 aesthetic design assets technological innovation may sometimes require the activation of only one asset type but more often a specific constellation of more asset types has to be mobilized the asset categories differ profoundly with respect not only to their respective competence bases but also with respect to their functional contribution to industrial innovation and mostly also to their organizational attachment this way of conceiving technological innovation is opposed to the one dimensional r d conception that tends to view r d as one functional asset along with others like manufacturing or marketing it is argued that the different innovative assets are often located in different organizational settings within the corporation the coupling between assets is discussed in terms of inter asset specificity we illustrate the great variation of innovative asset profiles across a wide spectrum of product categories the concept of technological trajectories is reinterpreted in terms of asset profile oscillations and regroupings finally the framework is related to recent efforts to formulate a resource based theory of the firm and the implications for innovation strategy is discussed

explaining differences in productive efficiency an application to belgian municipalities the purpose of this paper is to measure and explain variations in productive efficiency of municipal governments in belgium technical efficiency is evaluated using a non parametric method based on the free disposal hull fdh reference technology we first calculate input output and graph farrell efficiency measures for a cross section of all 589 belgian municipalities in a second stage of the analysis we explain the calculated differences in efficiency in terms of variables related to the structural characteristics of municipalities and to the institutional environment

experience tenure and the perceptions of employers this paper examines how group based assessments concerning employee ability impact employee compensation the employer learns about worker ability through bayesian updating creating an additional channel for wage growth that is not available to those workers with only general labor market experience consistent with the model s predictions results from national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy indicate that black workers fare much better relative to white workers in returns to tenure than in returns to experience finally parameter estimates in the structural model suggest that employers initially undervalue black males but that their wages rise with learning by employers over time on average black males earn lower wages than white males just as average wages differ across many groups this paper examines one explanation for this wage gap the possibility that employers underestimate the ability of workers in one or more groups in particular this paper proposes a model that provides explicit predictions about the affect of employer s perceptions on workers returns to general experience and tenure on the job we then examine the wage growth of young males to see whether patterns are consistent with the model economic theory provides many other explanations for differences in wages across groups

patent statistics in the age of globalisation new legal procedures new analytical methods new economic interpretation abstract patent analysis seems to become more difficult in the age of globalisation starting from microlevel observations it is evident that multinational enterprises pursue different technological marketing and strategic aims in effect they cover world markets in a distinctly different manner with patent intellectual property this article in good economic tradition starts with consideration of recent microlevel patent behaviour in telecommunications before new macroeconomic procedures to measure technical change are outlined the new challenges to patent statistics comprise the assignment of countries to patent documents of multinational firms the appropriate use of economic filters in comparing patent statistics from various patent offices the fitting of the new international patent procedures offered by the amended patent cooperation treaty pct to national statistics the assignment of patent applications in case of withdrawn country destinations and the estimation of time series if most recent data sets are incomplete we propose consistent workable adjustments to patent statistics that overcome the above mentioned biases which we denote the triad patent model for measuring technical progress in the proper economic sense first applications deal with the assessment of the pace of technical change in major countries up until 1995 in conclusion we discuss problems for future research the main policy implication is that macroeconomic patent statistics can correct for the effects of global knowledge production indeed as these are not disruptive but rather limited and well accountable

earnings mobility and measurement error a pseudo panel approach the degree of mobility in incomes is often seen as an important measure of the equality of opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom of its labor market but estimation of mobility using panel data is biased by the presence of measurement error and non random attrition from the panel this paper shows that dynamic pseudo panel methods can be used to consistently estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in the presence of non classical measurement errors these methods are applied to data on earnings from a mexican quarterly rotating panel absolute mobility in earnings is found to be very low in mexico suggesting that the high level of inequality found in the cross section will persist over time however the paper finds conditional mobility to be high so that households are able to recover quickly from earnings shocks these findings suggest a role for policies which address underlying inequalities in earnings opportunities