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

austrian and industrial organization perspectives on firm level competitive activity and performance drawing on the austrian school of economics and the structure conduct performance s c p paradigm of industrial organization the authors present and test a dynamic model of competitive activity and performance they examine the model in two stages first they explore the influence of industry level and firm level cooperative mechanisms on firm level competitive activity second they examine the effect of firm and industry level competitive activity on firm performance the authors use the dynamic model of competitive activity to examine the complex linkages between the firm s environment its actions and its performance outcomes they report a longitudinal analysis of a sample of 1 903 competitive moves undertaken in the software industry hypothesis testing supports the relationships in the model argued from the austrian perspective but provides only partial support for those derived from the s c p paradigm firm level cooperative mechanisms are found to increase the firm s competitive activity a

the effect of ecb monetary policies on interest rates and volumes abstractthis article assesses the transmission of ecb monetary policies conventional and unconventional to both interest rates and lending volumes or bond issuance for three types of different economic agents through five different markets sovereign bonds at 6 month 5 year and 10 year horizons loans to nonfinancial corporations and housing loans to households during the financial crisis and for the four largest economies of the euro area we look at three different unconventional tools excess liquidity longer term refinancing operations and securities held for monetary policy purposes following the decomposition of the ecb s weekly financial statements we first identify series of ecb policy shocks at the euro area aggregate level by removing the systematic component of each series and controlling for announcement effects we second include these exogenous shocks in country specific structural var in which we control for credit demand the main result is that only the pass through from the ecb r

responding to rivals and complements how market concentration shapes generational product innovation strategy this study examines how competitive market conditions shape the responsiveness with which businesses release generational product innovations gpis following the introduction of gpis by either competitors or complementary firms gpis are substantial technical advances in the performance of products within technology regimes prior studies of innovation timing in the organizational strategy literature emphasize internally driven strategies of gpi although internally driven strategies may predominate when businesses face diffuse competition for their product lines the literature largely overlooks the point that businesses need to be increasingly responsive to external events as market concentration increases this study which examines businesses competing in the u s packaged software industry in the 1990s shows that increasing industry concentration raises the stakes surrounding market positions and leads to greater interdependence of innovation strategies in an industry including interactions both with competitors and with other players in a larger system of complementary products as concentration increases therefore organizations are less driven by historical patterns of innovation and become increasingly responsive to innovations by both types of external actors

timing order and durability of new product advantages with imitation this research examined the effects of timing order and the durability of first mover advantages by analyzing the stock market reactions to new product introductions and imitations the major findings are that both timing and order of moves are important and that rival reactions undermine the durability of first mover advantages more specifically 1 early and fast movers achieve greater gains than late and slow movers and 2 first movers suffer at the time of new product imitations copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

organizational inertia and momentum a dynamic model of strategic change this study provides an empirical test of hannan and freeman s theory of structural inertia we examined the changes organizations undertook in response to a major environmental change in addition

individual preferences organization and competition in a model of r d incentive provision abstract understanding the organization of rd 2 knowledge is not perfectly appropriable 3 scientists are responsive to both monetary and non monetary incentives and 4 firms compete on the product market we show that both knowledge spillovers and market competition affect the incentives given to scientists and these effects interact first high knowledge spillovers lead firms to soften incentives when product market competition is high and to strengthen incentives when competition is low second the relationship between the intensity of competition and the power of incentives is u shaped with the exact shape depending on the degree of knowledge spillovers we also show that the performance contingent pay for both applied and basic research increases with the non pecuniary benefits that scientists obtain from research while the fixed component decreases we relate our findings to the existing empirical evidence and also discuss their implications for management and public policy

generational technological change effects of innovation and local rivalry on performance we tested the effects of innovation and market complexity on firm performance generational technological change a major advance within a technology regime fosters the emergence of niches and local

sources procedures and microeconomic effects of innovation fabio arcangeli paul david frank engelman christopher freeman massimo moggi richard nelson luigi orsenigo nathan rosenberg michele salvati g n von tunzelman two anonymous referees and the participants at the meeting of the committee on distribution growth and technical progress of the italian national research council cnr rome november 16 1985 have helped with various redraftings a particularly grateful acknowledgment is for the insightful and patient help of moses abramovitz this work has been undertaken at the science policy research unit spru university of sussex as part of the research program of the designated research centre sponsored by the economic and social research council esrc earlier support to the research that led to this paper by the italian national research council cnr is also gratefully acknowledged the statistical research has been undertaken with the assistance of stephano brioschi ilaria fornari and giovannu prennushi

the ecb and the interbank market this paper analyses the impact on the macroeconomy of the ecb s non standard monetary policy implemented in the aftermath of the collapse of lehman brothers in the fall of 2008 we study in particular the effect of the expansion of the intermediation of transactions across central bank balance sheets as dysfunctional financial markets seize up which we regard as a key channel of transmission for non standard monetary policy measures our approach is similar to lenza et al 2009 but we introduce the important innovation of distinguishing between private intermediation of interbank transactions in the money market and central bank intermediation of bank to bank transactions across the eurosystem balance sheet we do this by exploiting data drawn from the aggregate monetary and financial institutions mfi balance sheet which allows us to construct a new measure of the policy shock represented by the ecb s increasing role as a financial intermediary we find that bank loans to households and in particular to non financial corporations are higher than would have been the case without the ecb s intervention in turn the ecb s support has a significant impact on economic activity two and a half years after the failure of lehman brothers the level of industrial production is estimated to be 2 higher and the unemployment rate 0 6 percentage points lower than would have been the case in the absence of the ecb s non standard monetary policy measures

technological regimes and schumpeterian patterns of innovation this paper proposes that the specific pattern of innovative activities in an industry can be explained as the outcome of different technological learning regimes a technological regime is defined by the particular combination of technological opportunities appropriability of innovations cumulativeness of technical advances and properties of the knowledge base building upon the distinction between schumpeter mark i and schumpeter mark ii industries this paper provides empirical estimates of the relationships between indicators of the schumpeterian patterns of innovation concentration of innovative activities stability in the hierarchy of innovators and importance of new innovators and indicators of the variables defining technological regimes

macroeconomics and the term structure this paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance the topic is important to investors and also to policymakers who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations from longer term interest rates and take actions to influence those rates the simplest model of the term structure is the expectations hypothesis which posits that long term interest rates are expectations of future aver age short term rates in this paper we show that many features of the configuration of interest rates are puzzling from the perspective of the expectations hypothesis we review models that explain these anomalies using time varying risk premia although the quest for the fundamental macroeconomic explanations of these risk premia is ongoing inflation uncertainty seems to play a large role finally while modern finance theory prices bonds and other assets in a single unified framework we also consider an earlier approach based on segmented markets market segmentation seems important to understand the term structure of interest rates during the recent financial crisis jel e31 e43 e52 e58

preemptive patenting and the persistence of monopoly this article takes a different tack and inquires whether institutions such as the patent system create opportunities for firms with monopoly power to maintain their monopoly power the results apply to other situations such as brand identification spatial location and capacity expansion which share the characteristic that early or preemptive actions may lower the returns to potential competitors

technological extinctions of industrial firms an inquiry into their nature and causes after a buildup in the number of firms new industries commonly experience a shakeout in which the number of firms declines sharply three theoretical perspectives on how technological change contributes to industry shakeouts are analyzed the theories are used to synthesize predictions concerning technological change and industry evolution the predictions inform an analysis of four us industries that experienced sharp shakeouts automobiles tires televisions and penicillin using data on firm participation and innovation from the commercial inception of the four products through their formative eras we uncover regularities in how the products evolved the regularities suggest that shakeouts are not triggered by particular technological innovations nor by dominant designs but by an evolutionary process in which technological innovation contributes to a mounting dominance by some early entering firms copyright 1997 by oxford university press

industrial ecology and the rediscovery of inter firm recycling linkages historical evidence and policy implications industrial ecology is one of the most influential perspectives to have emerged in recent years in the wider discourse on sustainable development the vast majority of industrial ecologists believe that past economic development was characterized by a linear system of extraction use and disposal one of their main goals is therefore to find ways to make modern industrial economies mimic ecosystems by transforming the waste of one firm into the valuable input of another historical evidence presented in this article however demonstrates that inter firm recycling linkages were a dominant characteristic of past economic development if this was the case why do most writers on sustainability believe otherwise i suggest two broad categories of explanation a lack of research into the spontaneous formation of inter firm recycling linkages and the progressive and cumulative implementation of market distortions and regulatory barriers to resource recovery over the last century one implication of these findings is that the most important task facing industrial ecologists is probably not the technical challenge of planning resource recovery between firms but the development of an institutional framework that forces firms to internalize their externalities while leaving them the necessary freedom to develop new and profitable uses for by products copyright 2002 oxford university press

the unconventional monetary policy of the european central bank effectiveness and transmission analysis since the beginning of the financial crisis in summer 2007 the european central bank ecb has redirected traditional monetary policy based on interest rates to an unconventional monetary policy focused on the quantitative expansion of its balance sheet in this context the present paper aims to assess the effectiveness of unconventional monetary policy instruments with regard to inflation and economic growth to this end the methodology is based on the estimation of a structural vector autoregressive model for the period 2007 q1 2018 q4 using four variables eonia the total amount of assets on the ecb s balance sheet the eurozone inflation rate and the eurozone economic growth rate the results show a slight impact of the different balance sheet policies on inflation and economic activity behaviour especially during the last year of the financial crisis the robustness of these results is supported by the estimation of the same model replacing eonia rates with shadow rates therefore the results support the existence of monetary transmission for the period during which the unconventional monetary policy was developed as well as the effectiveness of the monetary policy adopted by the ecb in its commitment to price stability

the effectiveness of incomplete and overlapping pollution regulation evidence from bans on phosphate in automatic dishwasher detergent abstract this paper examines the effectiveness of command and control policies in the presence of incomplete and overlapping regulations we study how recent bans on phosphate in household dishwasher detergent affect pollution loads to waterways costs at wastewater treatment facilities and consumer behavior we show that the effectiveness of the bans in reducing effluent depends critically on regulations at receiving treatment facilities as cost minimizers facilities with an emissions standard on phosphorus face no incentive to deviate from the standard we show that bans have weak effects on effluent especially in the most polluted waterways we also use an early isolated ban in spokane washington to study the effect of the bans on consumers we find that this ban shifted approximately 40 of dishwasher detergent sales from spokane to bordering counties until a state wide ban was implemented using these estimates we find that the welfare loss to consumers from recent bans is likely greater than the cost savings to treatment plants

monetary policy in exceptional times this paper describes the way in which the european central bank ecb the federal reserve and the bank of england conducted monetary policy since the beginning of the financial crisis in august 2007 we argue that both quantitative easing and the other non standard measures introduced by central banks that changed the composition of the asset side of their balance sheets so called qualitative easing acted mainly through their effects on interest rates and in particular on money market spreads rather than solely through quantity effects in terms of the money supply we perform a quantitative exercise on the euro area which estimates the effect of the reduction of these spreads to the broader economy michele lenza huw pill and lucrezia reichlin