measuring the spillovers from technical advance mainframe computers in financial services measuring the social gains from recent technological advances is difficult because there are no output indexes from some important adopters measurement methods that infer the willingness to pay of theadopting industries from the derived demand curve for a new technologyovercome this difficulty the derived demand for high speed computersfor use in banks finance and insurance is shown to imply a very largesocial gain to computerization that is not captured by computer manufacturers copyright 1986 by american economic association

behavioural development economics lessons from field labs in the developing world abstract explanations of poverty growth and development depend on the assumptions made about individual preferences and the willingness to engage in strategic behaviour economic experiments especially those conducted in the field have begun to paint a picture of economic agents in developing communities that is at variance with the traditional portrait we review this growing literature with an eye towards preference related experiments conducted in the field we also offer lessons on what development economists might learn from experiments we conclude by sharing our thoughts on how to conduct experiments in the field and then offer a few ideas for future research

academic research underlying industrial innovations there has been no systematic study of the characteristics of the universities and academic researchers that seem to have contributed most to industrial innovation nor do we know how such academic research has been funded this paper based on data obtained from sixty six firms in seven major manufacturing industries and from over two hundred academic researchers sheds new light on the sources characteristics and financing of academic research underlying industrial innovation the findings should be of interest to economists concerned with technological change and to policymakers attempting to increase the economic payoff from the nation s academic research copyright 1995 by mit press

effects of post privatization governance and strategies on export intensity in the former soviet union the fall of the soviet union brought new enterprise opportunities whose exploitation required the development of entirely new strategies simultaneously enterprises faced crucial constraints in their governance structures this paper analyzes the impact of governance structures of privatized firms on one key outcome of new strategies export intensity using a longitudinal multi industry dataset of privatized firms in russia ukraine and belarus we analyze how export intensity is mediated by strategies involving product development acquisitions and links with foreign partners

the role of institution building in us industrial modernization programs abstract an important issue for evaluating industrial modernization programs is how well alternative intervention strategies address the underlying problems that contribute to uneven patterns of technology adoption the one on one industrial extension service model where the state agency provides technical assistance directly to individual firms constitutes one approach by contrast institution building approaches emphasize inter firm learning in which government serves as the catalyst for bringing technology developers together with potential users and for providing closer linkages between organizations that are the technology leaders and those that tend to be followers programs that support such inter firm learning opportunities stand a better chance of contending with the underlying problems retarding technology transfer are more likely to gain acceptability by both technology leaders and followers and are more likely to garner funds from the private sector

l etranger status property rights and investment incentives in cote d ivoire this study uses data from cote d ivoire to show that outsider households have relatively small land holdings and less complete rights over land than locals it then demonstrates a link between property rights and investment incentives by looking at the decision to leave land fallow outsiders fallow a smaller proportion of their land indicating that their farms are left uncultivated for shorter periods this is only partly explained by their incomplete property rights and relative land poverty these differences in investment patterns lead to lower yields per hectare jel o12 q15

measuring subjective expectations in developing countries a critical review and new evidence the majority of economic decisions taken by individuals are forward looking and thus involve their expectations of future outcomes understanding the expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial importance to designing and evaluating policies in health education finance migration social protection and many other areas however the majority of developing country surveys are static in nature and do not contain information on the subjective expectations of individuals possible reasons given for not collecting this information include fears that poor illiterate individuals do not understand probability concepts that it takes far too much time to ask such questions or that the answers add little value this paper provides a critical review and new analysis of subjective expectations data from developing countries and refutes each of these concerns the authors find that people in developing countries can generally understand and answer probabilistic questions such questions are not prohibitive in time to ask and the expectations are useful predictors of future behavior and economic decisions the paper discusses the different methods being tried for eliciting such information the key methodological issues involved and the open research questions the available evidence suggests that collecting expectations data is both feasible and valuable suggesting that it should be incorporated into more developing country surveys

performance benchmarking and measuring program impacts on customers lessons from the midwest manufacturing technology center abstract most attempts to evaluate the impact of manufacturing extension suffer from at least one of three weaknesses 1 subjectivity of the outcome data 2 inattention to industry leading to inappropriate outcome measures and 3 lack of controls this article reports on our work on the michigan manufacturing technology center mmtc evaluation effort and our attempts to redress these weaknesses since 1991 the mmtc has established a database of performance metrics tracking changes over time for both mmtc clients and a non client control group these data coupled with a detailed scheme for characterizing heterogeneous mmtc interventions provide the raw inputs for an analysis of the impact of mmtc operations analysis of the relative change in client performance from 1990 1992 and from 1991 1993 have demonstrated that mmtc clients are indeed taking some actions that lead to faster improvement relative to the control group but a notable exception is the area of employee computer use client firms are increasing their use of computers throughout the workforce at a slower rate than the control group this is of particular concern as employee computer use is strongly correlated with labor productivity which is closely related to improved profits and wages the article outlines our approach and analysis summarizes our recommendations to the mmtc for program improvements and reflects briefly on the lessons for manufacturing extension policy more generally

problems with repeated measures analysis demonstration with a study of the diversification and performance relationship this study reviews how repeated measures analysis has been applied and discusses alternative approaches for that type of analysis a content analysis of 86 repeated measures studies showed a lack o

the welfare analysis of product innovations with an application to computed tomography scanners the main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric that is equating the magnitude of innovations with the welfare gains they generate this research design is applied to the case of computed tomography scanners a revolutionary innovation in medical technology the econometric procedure centers on the estimation of a discrete choice model the nested multinominal logit which yields the parameters of a utility function defined over the changing quality dimensions of the innovative product the estimated flow of social gains from innovation is used to compute a social rate of return to r d to explore the interrelation between innovation and diffusion and to trace the time profile of benefits and costs the latter suggesting the possible occurrence of technological cycles

resistance to reform status quo bias in the presence of individual specific uncertainty comment why do governments so often fail to adopt policies which economists consider to be efficiency enhancing our answer to this question relies on uncertainty regarding the distribution of gains and losses from reform we show that there is a bias towards the status quo and hence against efficiency enhancing reforms whenever some of the individual gainers and losers from reform cannot be identified beforehand there are reforms which once adopted will receive adequate political support but would have failed to carry the day ex ante the argument does not rely on risk aversion irrationality or hysteresis due to sunk costs jel d72 f13 why do governments so often fail to adopt policies that economists consider to be efficiency enhancing this is one of the fundamental questions of political economy the answer usually relies on what may be

academic research and industrial innovation the purpose of this study is to estimate the extent to which technological innovations in various industries have been based on recent academic research and the time lags between the investment in recent academic research projects and the industrial utilization of their findings because no attempt to my knowledge has been made to estimate the social rate of return from academic research we also make some rough and tentative estimates of this sort while the results are subject to many limitations discussed below they should be of interest to public policy makers concerned with science and technology as well as to

inertia and change in the early years employment relations in young high technology firms this paper considers processes of organizational imprinting in a sample of 100 young high technology companies it examines the effects of a pair of initial conditions the founders models of the employment relation and their business strategies our analyses indicate that these two features were well aligned when the firms were founded however the alignment has deteriorated over time due to changes in the distribution of employment models in particular the star model and commitment model are less stable than the engineering model and the factory model despite their instability these two blueprints for the employment relation have strong effects in shaping the early evolution of these firms in particular firms that embark with these models have significantly higher rates of replacing the founder chief executive with a non founder as well as higher rates of completing an initial public stock offering some implications of these findings for future studies of imprinting and inertia in organizations are discussed

does manufacturing extension matter an evaluation of the industrial technology extension service in new york abstract building on pioneering state programs in the 1980s new federal initiatives call for a significant expansion in the scale and scope of manufacturing extension efforts in the united states this article presents an evaluation of one effort to spur industrial modernization the industrial technology extension service ites in new york state based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis the evaluation suggests that the ites program has had a favorable impact on many companies with respect to cost reductions and increased productivity the article discusses some of the difficult methodological issues in evaluating these types of programs and includes a series of recommendations on strengthening future evaluations to yield more definitive results

institutional theory and mnc subsidiary hrm practices evidence from a three country study this study sets out to explore human resource management hrm practices in multinational corporation mnc subsidiaries within an institutional theory framework based on a sample of 158 subsidiaries of mncs operating in the united states russia and finland the paper examines factors hypothesised to influence the hrm practices adapted in us japanese and european mnc subsidiaries located in russia finland and the us the results indicate significant differences in hrm practices used across host countries both the status of the subsidiary human resource department and the degree to which the subsidiary was involved in knowledge transfer with other parts of the mnc had a significant impact on the selection of hrm practices

property rights and the political organization of agriculture we propose a general equilibrium model where the economic organization of agriculture and the political equilibrium determining the security of property rights are jointly determined in particular because the form of organization may affect the probability and distribution of benefits from future property challenges it may be shaped in anticipation of this impact property rights security may then be secured at the expense of economic efficiency the model provides a framework for understanding why in some contexts land is redistributed primarily via land sales and tenancy markets but via politics and conflict in others we test some implications of the theory using a five decade panel dataset that traces changes in the extent of tenancy and tenancy reform across 15 indian states

insecurity of property rights and matching in the tenancy market this paper analyzes the functioning of land rental markets in the dominican republic using a new data set collected specifically to characterize the entire market we analyze the choice of the landlords and the tenants in the search for the optimal partner we show how insecure property rights leads to segmentation in the tenancy markets along socio economic group and hence severely limits access to land for the rural poor

is risk aversion really correlated with wealth how estimated probabilities introduce spurious correlation economists frequently focus on correlations between wealth and risk preferences but rarely observe the probabilities needed to test this relationship empirically these unobserved probabilities are typically estimated via profit or production functions conditioned on wealth correlates which may leave statistical fingerprints on subsequently estimated risk aversion coefficients and confound correlations between wealth and risk preferences using data from an experiment with observable probabilities we compare risk aversion coefficients based on true probabilities with those based on probabilities estimated using standard approaches and show how estimated probabilities can change risk aversion coefficients substantially and introduce spurious correlation between risk aversion and wealth

endogenous matching and the empirical determinants of contract form empirical work on contracts typically regresses contract choice on observed principal and agent characteristics if i some of these characteristics are unobserved or partially observed and ii there are incentives whereby particular types of agents end up contracting with particular types of principals estimated coefficients on the observed characteristics may be misleading we address this endogenous matching problem using a data set on agricultural contracts between landlords and tenants in early renaissance tuscany controlling for endogenous matching has an impact on parameters of interest and tenants risk aversion appears to have influenced contract choice

competition and privatization amidst weak institutions evidence from mongolia mongolia s mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism this paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling for possible selection biases competition has quantitatively large effects perfectly competitive firms having nearly double the efficiency of monopolies enterprises with residual state ownership appear to be more efficient than other enterprises reflecting an environment where the government was pressured to focus on efficiency and institutions gave little voice to outsider owners jel p0 l1 l33 o12

testing between competing models of sharecropping the marshallian approach assumes a prohibitively high cost of monitoring the sharecropper s activities while the monitoring approach argues that landlords stipulate and effectively monitor sharecroppers activities i present new evidence using detailed data collected from eight indian villages most tenants own some land of their own this provides a controlled environment in studying the impact of contractual arrangements the differences in input and output intensities on owned minus sharecropped land of the same household are found to be sizable and significant suggesting a rejection of the monitoring approach and supporting the notion of the marshallian productive inefficiency of sharecropping

the profits of power land rights and agricultural investment in ghana we examine the impact of ambiguous and contested land rights on investment and productivity in agriculture in akwapim ghana we show that individuals who hold powerful positions in a local political hierarchy have more secure tenure rights and that as a consequence they invest more in land fertility and have substantially higher output the intensity of investments on different plots cultivated by a given individual corresponds to that individual s security of tenure over those specific plots and in turn to the individual s position in the political hierarchy relevant to those specific plots

insider ownership human resource strategies and performance in a transition economy researchers and potential investors in transition economies need to understand the human resource management hrm strategies of target firms since human resources are arguably their most valuable assets understanding is difficult however because hrm strategies help to determine firms performance but are in turn influenced by corporate governance particularly insider ownership this paper employs a structural equation modeling methodology to examine the relations between governance hrm strategies and performance in the context of a novel dataset of ukrainian industrial firms it is found that insider ownership is positively associated with high commitment hrm strategies and negatively with low commitment cost cutting hrm strategies cost cutting hrm strategies are in turn associated with weaker firm performance these outcomes correspond broadly with theoretical expectations

justifying the first order approach to principal agent problems it is of interest to know when the incentive compatibility conditio n in principal agent problems can be replaced by the condition that the agent s expected utility be stationary in effort the mirrlees rogerson conditions do not work if the principal can observe more than one observable statistic also the mirrlees rogerson assumption that the distribution function of output is convex in the agent s action is unsatisfactory even in the context of the basi c model it is too restrictive the paper presents a suite of conditio ns that are applicable to the multistatistic case and replaces the objectionable convex distribution function assumption copyright 1988 by the econometric society

an assessment of the measurement of performance in international business research a sizeable body of international business ib research is devoted to building knowledge about the determinants of organizational performance a key precursor to accurately diagnosing why some organizations succeed in the international marketplace while others struggle is operationalizing performance appropriately yet to date no systematic investigation has considered how well ib research measures performance we examine the measurement of performance in 96 articles published in the academy of management journal administrative science quarterly journal of marketing journal of marketing research journal of international business studies management science organization science a nd thestrategic management journal between 1995 and 2005 the findings reveal that most studies do not measure performance in a manner that captures the multifaceted nature of the construct we describe the implications of these results and offer suggestions for improving future practice journal of international business studies 2008 39 1064 1080

strong legacies and weak markets bulgarian state owned enterprises during early transition the authors examine the factors affecting the performance of state owned enterprises soes during early transition to a market economy data come from a longitudinal study of a representative sample of bulgarian soes for the period from 1989 the last year under communism to 1993 three years after major macroeconomic shifts they investigate how changes in authority structure work organization technology marketing strategy and organizational boundaries during these years affected organizational performance in 1993 they also assess the degree of path dependence in performance and the role of competitive industry conditions numerous organizational changes made by soes during early transition had little effect on performance yet organizational performance from 1989 to 1993 was highly path dependent although this dependence was mediated by the competitive conditions stronger markets displayed less path dependence overall the results favor the interpretations derived from selected neo institutional and ecological perspectives of organizational sociology over neoclassical economic interpretations

evidence on the incentive properties of share contracts abstract ever since adam smith share contracts have been condemned for their lack of incentives sharecropping tenants face incentives to undersupply productive inputs since they receive only a fraction of the marginal revenue the empirical literature reports that lands under sharecropping are indeed less productive and employ inputs less intensively than those operated by owners this paper shows that 1 sharecropping and fixed rent tenancy are both associated with low quality lands 2 plots under sharecropping and fixed rent present on average the same unconditional productivity 3 controlling for observed land quality and input use their average productivities are also identical to those of owner operated plots and 4 the input choices satisfy the same profit maximization conditions for all land contracts these results challenge the conventional wisdom connecting sharecropping to incentive distortions they support an alternative view that farmers optimally employ more input resources into

observing unobservables identifying information asymmetries with a consumer credit field experiment information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice we estimate the presence and importance of hidden information and hidden action problems in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology we randomized 58 000 direct mail offers to former clients of a major south african lender along three dimensions i an initial offer interest rate featured on a direct mail solicitation ii a contract interest rate that was revealed only after a borrower agreed to the initial offer rate and ii a dynamic repayment incentive that was also a surprise and extended preferential pricing on future loans to borrowers who remained in good standing these three randomizations combined with complete knowledge of the lender s information set permit identification of specific types of private information problems our setup distinguishes hidden information effects from selection on the offer rate via unobservable risk and anticipated effort from hidden action effects via moral hazard in effort induced by actual contract terms we find strong evidence of moral hazard and weaker evidence of hidden information problems a rough estimate suggests that perhaps 13 to 21 of default is due to moral hazard asymmetric information thus may help explain the prevalence of credit constraints even in a market that specializes in financing high risk borrowers

land tenure climate and risk management abstract we analyze to what extent climate conditions affect the prevalence of sharecropping as a form of traditional land tenure we investigate how sharecropping tenure is related to climate risk and how it interacts with fertilizer use and livestock ownership that both influence production risk we first develop a stylized theoretical model to illustrate the role of climate for land tenure and production our empirical analysis is based on more than 9000 households with considerable heterogeneity in climate conditions across several african countries we find that farmers in areas with low precipitation are more likely to be sharecroppers we further find evidence for risk management interaction effects as sharecropping farmers are less likely to own livestock and more likely to use fertilizer in economies where formal kinds of insurance are unavailable sharecropping thus functions as a form of insurance and reduces the need for potentially costly risk management strategies

the nature of the farm abstract using a model based on a trade off between moral hazard incentives and gains from specialization this paper explains why farming has generally not converted from small family based firms into large factory style corporate firms nature is both seasonal and random and the interplay of these qualities generates moral hazard limits the gains from specialization and causes timing problems between stages of production by identifying conditions in which these forces vary we derive testable predictions about the choice of organization and the extent of farm integration to test these predictions we study the historical development of several agricultural industries and analyze data from a sample of over 1 000 farms in british columbia and louisiana in general seasonality and randomness so limit the benefits of specialization that family farms are optimal but when farmers are successful in mitigating the effects of seasonality and random shocks to output farm organizations gravitate toward fa

monitoring motivation and management the determinants of opportunistic behavior in a field experiment economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation employees are rational cheaters who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs we investigate the rational cheater model by observing how experimentally induced variation in monitoring of telephone call center employees influences opportunism a significant fraction of employees behave as the rational cheater model predicts a substantial proportion of employees however do not respond to manipulations in the monitoring rate this heterogeneity is related to variation in employee assessments of their general treatment by the employer jel d2 j2 l2 l8 m12

the role of risk and transaction costs in contract design evidence from farmland lease contracts in u s agriculture the objective of this article is to provide new empirical evidence on landlord tenant choices of share versus cash rent contracts in u s agriculture the focus is on the contribution of explanatory variables that represent transaction costs risk sharing incentives or both an empirical model of contract choice is tested against the 1999 agricultural economics and land ownership survey aelos and finds mixed evidence for low transaction cost and risk sharing incentive motives for landlord tenant choices of a share versus cash rent contract however the behavior of landlords and tenants is consistent with them being risk averse although it is standard to control for the riskiness of the principal s task that is contracted we find that other attributes of the landlord are an important part of a relatively complex story for u s land tenancy contacting the latter results have generally been ignored in other published landlord tenant contracting studies

moral hazard and marshallian inefficiency evidence from tunisia abstract we formalize the link between optimal cost sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well known results from duality theory building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature we show that optimal contractual structure is determined by the i substitution possibilities that exist between different observable factor inputs as well as ii between these inputs and unobservable effort we endogenize contractual choice using landlord characteristics as instruments exploiting the fact that in our dataset landlords interact with several tenants and vice versa the approach is applied to an unbalanced plot level panel of cost sharing contracts in a tunisian village using a translog representation of the restricted profit function contractual terms are found to be a significant determinant of input use and therefore lead to marshallian inefficiency while the optimality of the underlying contractual structure is rejected

the productivity impacts of formal and informal land rights evidence from madagascar this paper studies the relationship between land rights and agricultural productivity whereas previous studies used proxies for soil quality and instrumental variables to control for the endogeneity of land titles the data used here include precise soil quality measurements which in principle allow controlling for the unobserved heterogeneity between plots empirical results suggest that formal land rights i e land titles have no impact on productivity but that informal land rights i e landowners subjective perceptions of what they can and cannot do with their plots have heterogeneous impacts on productivity

when does privatization work the impact of private ownership on corporate performance in the transition economies this paper compares the performance of privatized and state firms in the transition economies of central europe while controlling for various forms of selection bias it argues that privatization has different effects depending on the types of owners to whom it gives control in particular privatization to outsider but not insider owners has significant performance effects where privatization is effective the effect on revenue performance is very pronounced but there is no comparable effect on cost reduction overlooking the strong revenue effect of privatization to outsider owners leads to a substantial overstatement of potential employment losses from postprivatization restructuring

capital market development and mass privatization are logical contradictions lessons from russia and the czech republic the introduction of mass privatization policies in russia and the czech republic depended on the creation of impersonal capital markets to finance the needs of privatized companies and to provide a secondary market for the trading of securities yet mass privatization created the contradictory conditions of generating millions of poorly informed shareholders with no efficient markets for the sale of the shares the absence of financial markets created systematic pressures to move assets by illegal or non transparent means to users who value them more privatization created the incentives to destroy the financial markets critical to its success a comparative case analysis of post privatization market formation in both these countries demonstrates that the functional necessity for these markets does not engender their own creation in the absence of institutional mechanisms of state regulation and trust markets become arenas for political contests and economic manipulation the irony of these policies is that a principal lesson has been that market reforms cannot create viable markets only institutional formation can copyright 2002 oxford university press

behind the market stage where real societies exist part i the role of public and private order institutions this two part article is an attempt to clarify the social conditions upon which the viability and efficiency of the market system rest it strives to show that the embeddedness thesis that is an explanation based upon the existence of long run personal ties involving the use of reputation mechanisms among transactors cannot fully elucidate the question as to how the problem of trust is solved in market societies as explained in part i there are difficulties of both theoretical and empirical historical kinds and these explain why the market order needs to be sustained by private and public order institutions in part ii the role of generalised morality in backing or supplementing such institutions is discussed in the light of game theory and particular emphasis is put on the ability of moral norms to sustain honest behaviour by generating the right kind of preferences and establishing trust the vexed problem of the dynamics of norm emergence and erosion is then addressed with a view to showing

land tenure security and investment incentives puzzling evidence from burkina faso abstract the commonsense logic associating higher land security and higher incentives to invest has been recently called into question in the case of african agriculture to be meaningful empirical tests have to be carefully designed so as to take account of the possible endogeneity of the land rights variable this is done in this paper by applying suitable econometric methods to the original data collected in burkina faso the results obtained cast doubt on the existence of a systematic influence of land tenure security on investment by reviewing the justifications for scepticism in the recent literature we are able to conclude that the traditional village order where it exists provides the basic land rights required to stimulate small scale investment

property rights by squatting land ownership risk and adverse possession statutes a fundamental aspect of private property is the right to exclude trespassers or squatters nonetheless in all 50 states a trespasser can acquire ownership by continuously occupying a parcel of land until the statutorily set period of limitations runs out although these adverse possession statutes appear to weaken property rights this paper explains how such limits are valuable to property owners by balancing the risk of claims from past legitimate owners against the cost of expelling future trespassers or squatters the empirical analysis using data from 46 states provides evidence that is consistent with the theory

moral hazard land fertility and sharecropping in a rural area of the philippines abstract introducing concerns about land fertility for landlords in a principal agent model of sharecropping with moral hazard we show that the optimal contract under limited commitment reflects a trade off between production and land quality maintenance using data from the philippines a model where the leasing out and contract choices are simultaneous is estimated and avoids the selectivity bias of observed contracts landlords prefer to use more incentive contracts for more fertile plots and less incentive ones when crop choices induce land overuse empirical tests reject the model of pure risk sharing in production and show the interest of taking land quality maintenance into account

management development and firm performance in germany norway spain and the uk while comparative studies of human resource management hrm are relatively plentiful few have examined the way organisations in different countries train and develop their managers or the impact of this upon firm performance given the centrality of management capability for corporate and national competitive performance this represents an important area of enquiry utilising telephone interview data from the human resource development manager and a line manager in 482 domestic and multinational organisations in four european countries patterns of management development md are found to differ according to country and to a lesser extent by international strategy however a significantly greater amount of organisational performance is explained by internal md strategies adopted by the organisations concerned and the credence accorded these by line managers

what do russian managers really do an observational study with comparisons to u s managers recent events have generated considerable interest but little empirical evidence in russia management this observation study of a sample of managers n 66 in a large textile factory in russia used the same definitions methodology and procedures as a stream of research conducted by luthans and his colleagues on u s real managers see luthans hodgetts and rosenkrantz 1988 similar to american managers the russian managers in this factory were observed in order to perform traditional management communications human resources and networking activities also similar to the managers studied in the u s the russian managers networking activity generally related to their success the relationship between the russian managers various activities and their effectiveness was less clear but like the american managers the communication activity was a significant predictor across analysis techniques the implications these findings have for russia s transition to a market economy are discussed

returns to r d on new drug introductions in the 1980s abstract this study finds that the mean irr for 1980 1984 u s new drug introductions is 11 1 and the mean npv is 22 million 1990 dollars the distribution of returns is highly skewed the results are robust to plausible changes in the baseline assumptions our work is also compared with a 1993 study by the ota despite some important differences in assumptions both studies imply that returns for the average nce are within one percentage point of the industry s cost of capital this is much less than what is typically observed in analyses based on accounting data

time to change what to sow risk preferences and technology adoption decisions of cotton farmers in china this paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in china i conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of chinese farmers who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified bt cotton a decade ago in my analysis i expand the measurement of risk preferences beyond expected utility theory to incorporate prospect theory i find that farmers who are more risk averse or more loss averse adopt bt cotton later farmers who overweight small probabilities adopt bt cotton earlier

issues and perspectives on evaluating manufacturing modernization programs abstract the establishment of a national system of federal state manufacturing modernization centers to serve small and medium sized manufacturing systems is a major experiment in the us the system s rapid expansion has made it impossible to begin with an experimental design that would systematically permit tests of the variables and relationships likely to effect the long term economic effectiveness of these centers or their political and financial stability relatedly many existing evaluation studies and journalistic narratives are marred by serious analytical and empirical flaws it is not too late to attempt to improve practice in future evaluations several areas of expanded evaluation are described including theories of industrial restructuring regional technology infrastructure public management financing evaluation design evaluability assessment firm learning and measurement of benefits and costs in each case evaluation is presented as a means of simultaneously yielding information relevant to formative and summative program level decisions and to hypothesis testing

governance and contract choice theory and evidence from groundwater irrigation markets abstract this paper examines the role governance institutions play in the adoption of contracts we develop a simple model of the contracting relationship in a setting where unverifiable outcomes exist and use it to interpret data on groundwater irrigation contracts in bangladesh a distinguishing feature of this market is the variety of village level institutions which impose different degrees of punishment for contract violation consistent with the model we find households adopt contracts that rely on unverifiable outcomes which are not formally contractible when punishment for contract violation is weak conversely households adopt contracts that rely on formally contractible and verifiable outcomes when punishment is severe this evidence is consistent with contract terms being chosen optimally given what is or is not formally contractible

insecure land rights and share tenancy evidence from madagascar most studies of tenurial insecurity focus on its effects on investment this paper studies the hitherto unexplored relationship between tenurial insecurity and land tenancy contracts based on distinct features of formal law and customary rights in madagascar this paper augments the canonical model of sharecropping by making the strength of the landlord s property right increasing in the amount of risk she bears within the contract using data on landlords subjective perceptions in rural madagascar empirical tests support the hypothesis that insecure property rights drive contract choice but offer little support in favor of the canonical risk sharing hypothesis

property rights and productivity the case of joint land titling in vietnam this paper explores the effect of land titling on agricultural productivity in vietnam and the productivity effects of single versus joint titling for husband and wife using a plot fixed effects approach our results show that obtaining a land title is associated with higher yields for both individually and jointly held titles we conclude that there is no tradeoff between joint titling and productivity and so joint titles are potentially an effective way to improve women s bargaining power within the household with no associated efficiency losses

the effect of human resource management practices on mnc subsidiary performance in russia this study investigates the relationship between human resource management hrm and the performance of 101 foreign owned subsidiaries in russia the study s results provide support for the assertion that investments in hrm practices can substantially assist a firm in improving performance further different hrm practices for managerial and non managerial employees are found to be significantly related to firm performance only limited support however is obtained for the hypothesized relationship between efforts at aligning hrm practices with firm strategy and subsidiary performance

the microeconomics of manufacturing modernization programs abstract manufacturing modernization programs are designed to improve the competitiveness of small and medium sized manufacturers by accelerating their use of best practice technologies justification for these programs is most often cast in terms of past slow rates of adoption international economic competitiveness and market failures in the provision of information these frameworks however do not adequately address policy and programmatic issues related to program design financing and program evaluation using a microeconomic model based on the firm and industry level effects of these programs we examine the importance of spillover benefits from modernization efforts both horizontal spillovers to rivals of program clients and vertical spillovers to clients customers and the implications for these policy and programmatic issues

does human resource management matter in a transitional economy china as an example this paper investigates the significance of how firms manage their human resources hrs within the confines of powerful social institutions in a transitional economy the people s republic of china china we propose that two dimensions the role of human resource management rhr and followers perception of the leader top are important contributors to firm performance as are the influences of the regional economy and firm ownership we tested our hypotheses with a survey of 180 firms from nine cities in china we found that both role of hrm rhr and follower s perception of top level management top are important to firm performance the study confirms that while social institutions remain powerful in a transitional economy effective hrm is important to firm performance

the meaning of kinship in sharecropping contracts analysis of a household survey from the philippines shows that the behavior of sharecroppers with a kinship relation with their landlord is not affected by the disincentive effects of product and factor sharing while behavior of the other sharecroppers responds to the contract terms we characterize the meaning of kinship ties through a survey of opinion conducted among tenants the survey shows that kin landlords help or are expected to help more frequently in case of emergency than other landlords and they do so with a wider range of instruments providing the incentive for cooperative behavior in sharecropping contracts among kin

bayesian herders updating of rainfall beliefs in response to external forecasts summary temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world s poor model based climate forecasts could benefit such populations provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations we test whether pastoralists in southern ethiopia and northern kenya update their expectations in response to forecast information the minority of herders who received these climate forecasts updated their expectations for below normal rainfall but not for above normal rainfall this revealed preoccupation with downside risk highlights the potential value of better climate forecasts in averting drought related losses but realizing any welfare gains requires that recipients strategically react to these updated expectations

the road taken origins and evolution of employment systems in emerging companies excerpt drawing on a unique archive of qualitative and quantitative data describing 100 bay area high technology firms within their first decade this paper examines the models of employment relations espoused by company founders and bow those models shaped the evolution of human resource management within their organizations information gleaned from interviews suggests that founders and others involved in designing and launching these companies had blueprints for the employment relation that varied along three key dimensions the primary basis of employee attachment and motivation the primary means for controlling and coordinating work and the primary criterion emphasized in selection based on combinations of these three dimensions firms in our sample cluster fall into one of four distinct types which we label the star factory engineering and commitment models multivariate statistical analyses document how the founder s employment model shaped the subsequent adoption and timing of various human resource policies and documents over these companies early histories as well as the speed with which the first full time human resource manager was appointed the findings are strongly suggestive of complementarities and a tendency toward internal consistency among dimensions of human resource management and of strong path dependence in the evolution of employment systems in organizations some implications of these findings for transactions cost perspectives on the employment relationship are discussed

on the mis use of wealth as a proxy for risk aversion tests of risk sharing in the contracting literature often rely on wealth as a proxy for risk aversion the intuition behind these tests is that since contract choice is monotonic in the coefficients of risk aversion which are themselves assumed monotonic in wealth the effect of a change in wealth on contract choice is clearly identified we show that tests of risk sharing relying on wealth as a proxy for risk aversion are identified only insofar as the econometrician is willing to assume that a the principal is risk neutral or her preferences exhibit constant absolute risk aversion cara and b the agent is risk neutral

current practices in the evaluation of us industrial modernization programs abstract the expansion of public policies and programs to promote the technological modernization of small and mid sized manufacturing enterprises in the united states has been accompanied by an increased interest in assessing the effectiveness and impact of these initiatives this article examines current practices used in the evaluation of us industrial modernization programs at state and national levels drawing on interviews with program managers site visits and scrutiny of available studies issues related to the meaning of evaluation in the context of industrial modernization the scale and scope of existing programs and the definition of metrics are considered a series of evaluation approaches methods and studies are identified and reviewed including the role of program monitoring customer valuation external reviews economic impact studies control groups and assessments of best practice the authors address the use of evaluation results and discuss key challenges and directions relevant to the development of more robust evaluation procedures