effects of profitability and liquidity on r d intensity japanese and u s companies compared this study investigates the proposition that japanese companies have a greater propensity than u s companies to sustain commitment to r d in the face of fluctuating profits and liquidity the anal

the output composition puzzle a difference in the monetary transmission mechanism in the euro area and u s we revisit recent evidence on how monetary policy affects output and prices in the u s and in the euro area the response patterns to a shift in monetary policy are similar in most respects but differ noticeably as to the composition of output changes in the euro area investment is the predominant driver of output changes while in the u s consumption shifts are significantly more important we dub this difference the output composition puzzle and explore its implications and several potential explanations for it while the evidence seems to point at differences in consumption responses rather than investment as the proximate cause for this fact the source of the consumption difference remains a puzzle

not only what but also when a theory of dynamic voluntary disclosure we examine a dynamic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of private information in our model a manager of a firm who may learn multiple signals over time interacts with a competitive capital market and maximizes payoffs that increase in both period prices we show perhaps surprisingly that in equilibrium later disclosures are interpreted more favorably even though the time the manager obtains the signals is independent of the value of the firm we also provide sufficient conditions for the equilibrium to be in threshold strategies

the inexorable and mysterious tradeoff between inflation and unemployment this paper discusses the short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it according to the consensus view among central bankers and monetary economists a contractionary monetary shock raises unemployment at least temporarily and leads to a delayed and gradual fall in inflation standard dynamic models of price adjustment however cannot explain this pattern of responses reconciling the consensus view about the effects of monetary policy with models of price adjustment remains an outstanding puzzle for business cycle theorists several years ago i gave myself a peculiar assignment i decided to try to summarise all of economics in ten simply stated principles the purpose of this task was to introduce students to the economic way of thinking in the first chapter of my textbook principles of economics i figured if god could boil all of moral philosophy down to ten commandments i should be able to do much the same with economic science most of the ten principles i chose were microeconomic and hard to argue with they involved the importance of tradeoffs marginal analysis the benefits of trade market efficiency market failure and so on i allocated the last three principles to macroeconomics the first of these was a country s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services which i viewed as the foundation of all growth theory the second was prices rise when the government prints too much money which i took to be the essence of classical monetary theory the last of my ten principles is the subject of today s lecture society faces a short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment perhaps not surprisingly this statement turned out to be controversial when my publisher sent out the manuscript for review a few readers objected

the financial accelerator and monetary policy rules abstract comparing bernanke et al s 1999 financial accelerator model to a comparable model without an operational financial accelerator mechanism we find that financial acceleration is reduced when monetary policy reacts to the output gap and when firm specific volatility rises

government r d subsidies as a signal for private investors abstract government subsidies for r d are intended to promote projects with high returns to society but too little private returns to be beneficial for private investors this may be caused by spillovers or a low appropriability rate apart from the direct funding of these projects government grants may serve as a signal for good investments for private investors we use a simple signaling model with different types of r d projects to capture this phenomenon the agency has a preference for basic research projects as they promise high expected social returns while banks prefer applied research projects with high private returns in a setup where the subsidy can only be used to distinguish between basic and applied research projects government agency s signal is not very helpful for banks however if the subsidy is accompanied by a quality signal it can lead to increased or better selected private investments

market share market value and innovation in a panel of british manufacturing firms this paper examines the empirical relationship between technological innovations market share and stock market value new developments in the estimation of dynamic count data models are used to control for unobserved firm specific heterogeneity we find a robust and positive effect of market share on observable headcounts of innovations and patents although increased product market competition in the industry tends to stimulate innovative activity furthermore the impact of innovation on market value is larger for firms with higher market shares we argue that our results are consistent with models where high market share firms have incentives to pre emptively innovate

high tech firms and credit rationing abstract informational frictions between borrowers and lenders differ across classes of borrowers innovative firms undertake high risk high return projects which are likely to be little understood by financial intermediaries as a consequence they may end up allocating too large a share of funds to traditional low risk low return projects this proposition finds some support in a cross section of italian manufacturing firms using several proxies to classify firms into high tech and low tech groups and direct information on each firm s access to bank credit high tech firms are found to be more likely to be credit constrained than low tech firms the results suggest that the responsiveness of r d expenditure to cash flow found in the literature is likely due to pervasive credit constraints on innovative firms rather than to cash flow proxying for future expectations the paper also sheds light on the main factors affecting the probability of a firm being rationed in the credit market

business unit strategy and changes in the product r d budget this study of changes in product r d intensity in business units supplements past studies by including two major classes of independent variables which have not been examined previously the competitive strategy of the business and role of the business in the overall corporate portfolio multiple regression analysis is used on a sample drawn from the pims data base the results suggest that r d decisions in growth businesses are responsive to competition evolving strategies and intra firm resource flows in mature businesses a pattern of stability and r d equilibrium is evident even in the face of changes by competitors managerial implications are noted

slow recoveries any role for corporate leverage abstract this paper examines whether financial conditions of the non financial corporate sector can explain why the recovery from recessions in the united states is slower since the mid 1980s leverage by the corporate sector has increased significantly since the financial deregulation of the mid 1980s empirical evidence shows that slow recoveries are associated with a significant drop in the growth rates of investment and bank loans and with a surge in the growth rates of corporate bonds in an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with a financial accelerator counterfactual experiments based on estimates of two samples 1965 1983 and 1984 2007 show that the non financial corporate indebtedness affects only marginally the speed of the recovery in the two samples

innovation and communication signalling with partial disclosure this paper introduces a model of feedback effect equilibrium i e equilibria in which an asymmetrically informed agent is motivated to communicate its privately known attribute but can do so only through channels or signals which convey directly useful information to competing agents this revelation to the competition serves to reduce the value of the private information held by the first agent models of this kind are of obvious relevance to realistic theories of product or financial market disclosure policies of firms patenting and a host of related behavioural and regulatory issues this model is developed in the context of a set of firms engaged in research and development rivalry in which the value of privately held and disclosed information arises from its implications for the likelihood and timing of productive innovation

strategic transparency and informed trading will capital market integration force convergence of corporate governance dominant investors can influence the publicly available information about firms by affecting the cost of information collection under strategic competition transparency results in higher variability of profits and output thus lenders prefer less transparency since this protects firms when in a weak competitive position while equity holders prefer more market interaction creates strategic complementarity in gathering information on competing firms thus entry by transparent competitors will improve price informativeness moreover as the return to information gathering increases with liquidity increasing global trading may undermine the ability of bank control to keep firms opaque

innovation and bureaucracy under soft and hard budget constraints because of the inherent uncertainty promotion of innovation critically depends on screening mechanisms to select projects this paper studies the relationship between bureaucracy and financial constraints as two such mechanisms the lack of commitment to hard financial constraints interferes with its ex post screening capability ex ante bureaucratic screening is optimally chosen as a substitute however bureaucracy makes mistakes by rejecting promising projects and delays innovation and the efficiency loss due to soft financial constraints increases as prior knowledge becomes worse and as research stage investment requirements become lower in a centralized economy bureaucracy may reduce the number of parallel projects particularly for projects with higher uncertainties and less research stage requirements this theory fits much of the evidence and in particular it explains why the computer industry but not the nuclear or aerospace industries has fared so poorly in centralized economies the fundamental importance of innovation to the survival and evolution of economic systems and organizations has long been recognized marx 1978 schumpeter 1950 innovation is characterized by its inherent uncertainty because it is a process whose every element takes considerable time in revealing its true features and ultimate effects schumpeter 1950 p 83 and people are unable to anticipate the future impact of successful innovations even after their technical feasibility has been established rosenberg 1994 an understanding of how different systems and organizations deal with the uncertainties associated with innovation and the resultant consequences is crucial for understanding alternative economic systems and organizations in this paper we provide a theory to analyse how different systems screen uncertain innovative projects and the impact of the various screening mechanisms on those systems we distinguish two alternative screening mechanisms the bureaucratic screening mechanism vs the market screening mechanism the latter is directly linked to financial constraints with this perspective our theory explains why centralized economies did well in certain areas of innovation but fared poorly in others for instance in the early 1960s the west was frightened by the ussr s great success in launching the first unmanned satellite and the first manned space capsule while in the 1980s in contrast the centralized system

ceo characteristics and firm r d spending over the past fifteen years a number of studies have examined the determinants of firm r d spending these studies however almost invariably focus on the role of firm or external ownership characteristics in predicting r d spending while overlooking the attributes of the top managers involved in allocating corporate resources in this study we change that focus by empirically examining how r d spending as compared to industry competitors varies at firms based on the characteristics of their ceos using a sample of publicly traded firms we find that ceo characteristics explain a significant proportion of the sample variance in firm r d spending even when corporate strategy ownership structure and other firm level attributes are controlled in terms of individual ceo characteristics we find that r d spending is greater at firms where ceos are younger have greater wealth invested in firm stock and signifacant career experience in marketing and or engineering r d in contrast to existing theory we find that the amount of a ceo s formal education had no significant association with r d spending once a ceo has attained a college degree however significant r d spending increases are found at firms where ceos have advanced science related degrees from subgroup analyses we further find that ceo effects on relative r d spending increase with longer ceo tenure implying that ceos over time may mold r d spending to suit their own preferences from these results we make implications for both research on determinants of r d spending and managerial practice

technological expectations and adoption of improved technology abstract attention is focused upon the adoption demand rather than the creation supply of new technology which improves from time to time based on the expected flow of technological progress over which the firm demander has no control it must decide either to adopt the current best available technology or to postpone adoption the distinguishing features of the model are that more than one technological innovation is anticipated and expectations about the likelihood of such innovations are revised as time passes since the last innovation our analysis shows that the firm will adopt the current best practice if its technological lag exceeds a certain threshold moreover as time passes without new technological advances it may become profitable to purchase a technology that has been available even though it was not profitable to do so in the past

risk and potential insurance in europe abstract this paper argues that risk is related to long run volatility of income and therefore stabilization policies should target permanent fluctuations we show that such fluctuations can in principle be insured away by a multinational fiscal federation which smooths income cross sectionally and has no ex ante permanent redistribution effects we propose a measure of risk and a measure of potential insurable risk we estimate these measures for the european countries and compare results with the us results show that potential insurable income risk in europe is about 45 most countries will benefit from an average income tax of 10 but gains differ widely across countries

monetary policy and the informational efficiency of the stock market the evidence from many countries 1987 monetary policy and the informational efficiency of the stock market the evidence from many countries applied economics vol 19 no 11 pp 1521 1532

edwin mansfield s contributions to the economics of technology abstract edwin mansfield s contributions to the economics of technology are summarized from the early 1960s through his death in 1997 mansfield s methodology is discussed as are his contributions on the diffusion of technical innovation the effect of firm size on innovation the role of academic and basic research in increasing innovation and productivity international technology transfer and the inaccuracy of technological forecasts the economics profession s evaluation of the relative importance of mansfield s work is presented using as evidence citation counts of his works collected from the social science citation index ssci identified as among mansfield s most important contributions are his work on the importance of academic research for industrial innovations his empirical estimation of the rates of diffusion of different innovations and his estimation of the private and social returns from investments in industrial innovations finally we present mansfield s advice on the future of the economics of technology

interpreting the macroeconomic time series facts the effects of monetary policy existing theory and evidence on the effects of monetary policy are reviewed substantial room for disagreement among economists remains new evidence based on multivariate time series studies of several countries is presented while certain patterns in the data consistent with effective monetary policy are strikingly similar across countries others particularly the tendency of interest rate increases to predict high inflation are harder to reconcile with effective monetary policy

the effects of american and japanese style employment and compensation practices on innovation success in the global marketplace increasingly requires that firms develop capabilities in innovation in this paper we argue that firms can use employment and compensation practices to foster innovation and support for innovation by employees conversely some employment and compensation systems will inhibit innovation a system that allows gain sharing by employees and provides employment assurance will foster innovation in the firm however a system that compensates employees with a fixed wage and allows for termination at will contains anti innovative incentives the former system is the prototypical japanese system particularly in large firms while the latter system is the prototypical american system the commercial success of japanese firms is increasingly attributed to successful innovation particularly in processes we argue that this success is partly attributable to the japanese style system of employment and compensation none of this suggests however that the japanese style practices c

dynamic models of r d innovation and productivity panel data evidence for dutch and french manufacturing abstract this paper introduces dynamics in the r d to innovation and innovation to productivity relationships which have mostly been estimated on cross sectional data it considers four nonlinear dynamic simultaneous equations models that include individual effects and idiosyncratic errors correlated across equations and that differ in the way innovation enters the conditional mean of labor productivity through an observed binary indicator an observed intensity variable or through the continuous latent variables that correspond to the observed occurrence or intensity it estimates these models by full information maximum likelihood using two unbalanced panels of dutch and french manufacturing firms from three waves of the community innovation survey the results provide evidence of robust unidirectional causality from innovation to productivity and of stronger persistence in productivity than in innovation

bargaining and sharing innovative knowledge we consider the problem of bargaining over the disclosure of interimresearch knowledge between two participants in an r d race for an ultimate patentable invention licence fee schedules that are functions of the amount of knowledge disclosed by the leading to the laggingagent are examined for their abilities to attain efficient outcomes andvarying shares of the surplus arising from disclosure in hersequential offers bargaining games the uninformed buyer is able to elicitfull disclosures without sharing the incremental surplus with any type ofthe licensor and thus do as well as a perfectly informed and discriminatingknowledge licensee

nominal price rigidity money supply endogeneity and business cycles abstract this paper investigates the ability of nominal price rigidity to explain the co movement of inflation with the cyclical component of output observed in the post war u s data a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed with the introduction of monopolistic competition and nominal price rigidity in a standard real business cycle model allowing for an endogenous money supply rule it is then demonstrated that sticky price models can explain the observed associations between movements in inflation and output much better than flexible price models this result depends little on whether money supply is assumed to be endogenous or not

the financing of research and development evidence on the funding gap for rd 2 evidence for high costs of rd 3 there are limits to venture capital as a solution to the funding gap especially in countries where public equity markets are not highly developed and 4 further study of governmental seed capital and subsidy programs using quasi experimental methods is warranted

optimal monetary policy with durable consumption goods abstract we document that the durable goods sector is much more interest sensitive than the nondurables sector and then investigate the implications of these sectoral differences for monetary policy we formulate a two sector general equilibrium model that is calibrated both to match the sectoral responses to a monetary shock derived from our empirical var and to imply an empirically realistic degree of sectoral output volatility and comovement while the social welfare function involves sector specific output gaps and inflation rates the performance of the optimal policy rule can be closely approximated by a simple rule that targets a weighted average of aggregate wage and price inflation in contrast a rule that stabilizes a more narrow measure of final goods price inflation performs poorly in terms of social welfare

some aspects of japanese corporate finance in this paper we attempt to blend economic theory with an understanding of the historical context and regulation of japanese financial markets particularly during the 1950s and 1960s the historical and regulatory context is critical since it represents the framework within which the economic forces operated that is we are interested in examining how a particular structure characterized by controlled interest rates segmentation of markets and functions and limited entry gave rise in understandable ways to distinctive corporate financial practices there have been a number of recent publications that attempt to describe and explain the japanese corporate financial system 1 perhaps the most discussed topics are the relatively high degree of financial leverage for the typical japa nese firm and the predominance of bank financing for the external funding of large corporations there also has been discussion of such apparent peculiarities in the equity markets as the issue of shares at a par value of 50 yen when their market value is 1 000 yen or more as well as the extensive cross holdings of shares between corporations the role of a firm s main bank as not only len der and financial advisor but in some cases exercising management control also has received attention before we address these issues we wish to make two points first the structure of the japanese financial system changed radically after world war ii as a consequence of legislation introduced by the occupation authorities and the need to rebuild for example with respect to high debt to equity ratios and heavy dependence on bank loans nakamura 26 cites evidence that equity comprised 67 percent of gross capital total assets for manufacturing industries in 1935 in a related vein kurosawa 22 provides figures that external funding by japanese corporations during the 1931 1936 period was only 4 percent from bank loans with 96 percent through stocks and industrial bonds

attracting skeptical buyers negotiating for intellectual property rights expropriable disclosures of knowledge to prospective buyers may be necessary to facilitate the sale of intellectual property ip in principle confidentiality agreements can protect disclosures by granting the seller rights to sue for unauthorized use in practice sellers often waive confidentiality rights we provide an incomplete information explanation for the waiver of confidentiality rights that are valuable in complete information settings waiving sacrifices the protective value of confidentiality to gain greater buyer participation buyer skepticism which reduces participation arises endogenously from three elements asymmetric information regarding seller ip rent dissipation from competition for ip and ex post costs from expropriation lawsuits

the japanese equity market past and present this paper discusses matters of economic interest related to the japanese equity market among other things it emphasizes the futures market in shares of the companies that managed the stock exchanges as an important element of the pre wwii market the stock market crisis of 1965 as an event that conditioned the subsequent course of public policy and institutional developments the zaraba continuous auction method as the microstructure of the exchanges and the uneven distribution of stock ownership and trading the poor performance of investment trusts and the high degree of concentration in the securities industry as the key contemporary features

liquidity effects monetary policy and the business cycle this paper presents a flexible price quantitative general equilibrium model with the property that a positive money supply shock drives the nominal interest rate down and aggregate employment output and the real wage up these implications are broadly consistent with postwar u s data the two key features of the model that are responsible for its properties are 1 money shocks have a heterogeneous impact on agents and 2 ex post inflexibilities in production give rise to a very low short run interest elasticity of money demand in our model the extent of the drop in the interest rate after a positive money supply shock depends on the degree to which production is ex post inflexible given sufficient ex post inflexibility the model conforms well with the view widely held within the u s federal system that the short run interest rate elasticity for total reserves is very close to zero copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

channels of interstate risk sharing united states 1963 1990 we develop a framework for quantifying the amount of risk sharing among states in the united states and construct data that allow us to decompose the cross sectional variance in gross state product into several components which we refer to as levels of smoothing we find that 39 percent of shocks to gross state product are smoothed by capital markets 13 percent are smoothed by the federal government and 23 percent are smoothed by credit markets the remaining 25 percent are not smoothed we also decompose the federal government smoothing into subcategories taxes transfers and grants to states

industrial governance structures innovation strategies and the case of japan sectoral or cross national comparative analysis in comparative research on industrial policy strategies attention has shifted from national level variables to sectoral variables in both the description and the explanation of policy the sectoral literature however lacks analytic focus and has provided little systematic insight into the causes of cross sectoral variance in governance structures and policy strategies based on recent contributions to the economics and sociology of formal organizations this article attempts to sharpen the concept of industrial sector and to provide a rationale for why sectoral structures and strategies vary next it develops a synthetic explanatory framework that combines sectoral analysis and national domestic structuralism in order to account for industrial innovation strategies in advanced capitalist countries in the final section the fruitfulness of this approach is illustrated by developing a new account of japan s success and failure in industrial innovation an account that overcomes the contradictions among the main alternatives offered in the past the key objective of the article however is to develop a new set of theoretical hypotheses for cross national research not a rigorous empirical test of its main propositions

innovating in the periphery the impact of local and foreign inventor mobility on the value of indian patents abstract we examine the impact of local and foreign labor mobility in india by modeling one regional and one global network each of which captures the inter organizational mobility of inventors our analysis of the regional network shows that within india the productivity of inventors does not improve when they move from foreign to indian organizations in the global network we find that indian organizations remain located in the periphery as a result of employing a small number of inventors from foreign organizations however in the instances when inventors are hired from foreign organizations they are able to produce patents with a higher impact in comparison to inventors hired from other indian organizations furthermore when the inventors are hired from abroad the impact of their patents is even higher in comparison the implications of these findings for innovation and policy in the emerging economy context are discussed

consumer preferences and product and process r d firms often conduct both product and process r d consumer preferences typically play a vital role in determining these r d choices the economics literature however has mostly ignored the interrelationship between the r d choices of firms and consumer preferences istudy product and process r d from the perspective of their relationship with consumer preferences in doing so i find a novel distinction between the two kinds of r d this distinction can explain several empirical observations regarding firms choices of the two and can also potentially enable us to better empirically identify the two

social capital innovation and growth evidence from europe this paper investigates the interplay between social capital innovation and economic growth in the european union we identify innovation as an important mechanism that transforms social capital into economic growth in an empirical investigation of 102 european regions in the period 1990 2002 we show that higher innovation performance is conducive to economic growth and that social capital affects growth indirectly by fostering innovation our estimates suggest that there is only a limited role for a direct effect of social capital on economic growth

relative efficiency of r d activities a cross country study accounting for environmental factors in the dea approach abstract this paper applies the production framework associated with the data envelopment analysis dea method to evaluate the relative efficiency of r d activities across countries r d capital stocks and manpower are treated as inputs while patents and academic publications are considered as outputs a three stage approach which involves using dea for evaluating efficiency and using tobit regressions for controlling the external environment is applied to 30 countries in recent years the results show that less than one half of the countries are fully efficient in r d activities and that more than two thirds are at the stage of increasing returns to scale most countries have a more significant advantage in producing sci cum ei publications than in generating patents

rent seeking and innovation innovations and their adoption are the keys to growth and development innovations are less socially useful but more profitable for the innovator when they are adopted slowly and the innovator remains a monopolist for this reason rent seeking both public and private plays an important role in determining the social usefulness of innovations this paper examines the political economy of intellectual property analyzing the trade off between private and public rent seeking while it is true in principle that public rent seeking may be a substitute for private rent seeking it is not true that this results always either in less private rent seeking or in a welfare improvement when the public sector itself is selfish and behaves rationally we may experience the worst of public and private rent seeking together

the influence of voluntarily disclosed qualitative information we examine the voluntary disclosure of qualitative information about actions involving governmental agencies and managerial intentions or beliefs in r d project announcements in the wall street journal our analysis indicates that information regarding government approval and managerial intentions beliefs voluntarily disclosed in r d project announcements interacts with industry firm variables to provide significant incremental explanatory power in both the innovation and commercialization stages of r d projects our data also indicate that the biggest impact is from managerial intentions especially an intent to increase market share when coupled with being a larger firm copyright 2000 john wiley sons ltd

international risk sharing and european monetary unification abstract we explore income and consumption smoothing patterns among european community ec countries and among oecd countries during the period 1966 90 we find that for oecd as well as for ec countries about 40 percent of shocks to gdp are smoothed at the one year frequency with about half the smoothing achieved through national government budget deficits and half by corporate saving at the three year differencing frequency only 25 percent of shocks to gdp are smoothed mainly via government lending and borrowing in the absence of alternative income and consumption smoothing mechanisms the restrictions on budget deficits imposed by the maastricht treaty should be relaxed to allow governments to run large temporary deficits in response to output shocks

the monetary transmission mechanism an empirical framework this paper provides an overview of the monetary transmission mechanism describing the impact of changes in monetary policy on real gdp changes in financial market prices including long term interest rates and exchange rates are the main vehicle for the transmission of policy the framework incorporates rational expectations and policy rules it is empirical and appears to fit the facts well

persistence of innovation in dutch manufacturing is it spurious this paper studies the persistence of innovation and the dynamics of innovation output in dutch manufacturing using firm data from three waves of the community innovation surveys cis pertaining to the periods 1994 1996 1996 1998 and 1998 2000 we estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic panel data type 2 tobit model accounting for individual effects and handling the initial conditions problem we find that there is no evidence of true persistence in achieving technological product or process innovations while past shares of innovative sales condition albeit to a small extent current shares of innovative sales

when did unsystematic monetary policy have an effect on inflation abstract an important stylized fact to emerge from var estimates is that exogenous monetary policy shocks also labelled unsystematic monetary policy have a delayed persistent hump shaped effect on inflation i argue that this empirical pattern is fragile in particular it disappears when one examines periods without large shifts in the level of inflation such as 1984 2005 an important consequence is that the hump shaped var estimated response of inflation is not appropriate to fit stylized models of the response of inflation around a stable steady state inflation level

deregulation disintermediation and agency costs of debt evidence from japan abstract many japanese firms reduced dependence on banks following financial deregulation in the 1980s the financial architecture of japanese firms after liberalization provides an opportunity to investigate the choice of financing with public bonds versus monitored bank loans examination of accounting and stock price data for a sample of japanese firms in the late 1980s suggests that debt structure is related to variables that serve as proxies for agency costs of debt in particular we find that the proportion of bond debt is inversely related to growth opportunities while the proportion of bank debt is positively related to growth opportunities

financial intermediation and delegated monitoring this paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders it presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs even in a risk neutral economy the paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems in the environment assumed in the model debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal the analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries

monetary transmission in the euro area early evidence monetary transmission evidence we examine the euro area monetary policy transmission process using post 1999 data with two main questions in mind has it changed after and because of economic and monetary union emu and if so is it becoming homogeneous across countries given the data limitations we concentrate on three components of the transmission mechanism the banking the interest rate and the asset market channels we find evidence that the transmission through banks has become more potent and homogeneous across countries on the financial market channels our evidence is somewhat weaker but suggestive the interest rate channel appears to have changed even before emu and now affects national economies in a broadly similar way the asset market channel proxied by the stock market effects of monetary policy also seems to work rather homogeneously across national markets no comparison with pre emu is available here a positive answer to both questions raised above represents in our view the best working hypothesis under current knowledge ignazio angeloni and michael ehrmann

the dynamic impacts of monetary policy an exercise in tentative identification it is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate these assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses this paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and m2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s in the later period identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses

r d reactions to high technology import competition for a seventeen year panel covering 308 u s manufacturers the authors analyze companies r d spending reactions to changes in high technology imports on average r d sales ratios were reduced in the short run as imports rose reactions tended to be more aggressive the more concentrated the markets were in which the firms operated when company r d operations were multinational and with greater company size and diversification reactions were less aggressive when special trade barriers had been erected reactions became more aggressive over the longer run copyright 1992 by mit press

union bargaining power subcontracting and innovation we show that if a firm can subcontract production to an informal sector an increase in union power may either increase or decrease innovation an increase in union power makes the firm worse off irrespective of its effect on innovation however in contrast to the usual belief an increase in union power may increase consumer surplus and decrease union utility by affecting innovation thus suggesting that a union may not want to be too powerful an increase in union power may create an ambiguous effect on social welfare our analysis provides new insights to the relation between union power and innovation

internal vs external financing of r d the empirical evidence suggests that while small firms in united states united kingdom and canada rely on internal funds for financing r d similar firms in japan germany and france have access to bank loans in this paper we analyze the financial decisions of small firms willing to invest in r d we find that their high ratio of intangible assets along with the high risk nature of their investments can explain their inability to raise debt in external capital markets we also show that financing r d with bank loans might be feasible especially if banks are willing to monitor the investment activities of their clients

understanding the financing of innovation and commercialization the case of the canadian functional food and nutraceutical sector we develop and implement two models to show what factors affect a firm s decision to seek external financing and the level of financing obtained in the canadian functional food and nutraceutical sector data from a national survey of functional foods and nutraceutical firms in canada conducted by statistics canada in 2003 is used for this analysis firm size being privately held and engaging in contractual arrangements have negative impacts on the likelihood of a firm seeking external funding while firms which are intensively involved in the functional food and nutraceutical sector with greater prospects for business expansion and or involved in partnerships are more likely to seek external financing larger firms and those involved in functional food and nutraceutical research and development receive a greater amount of capital when they decide to raise capital however firms focused on functional foods and nutraceuticals as opposed to more diversified firms and those involved in product developm

linking product and process innovations and modes of international sourcing in global competition a case of foreign multinational firms in increasingly complex global competition multinational firms u s and foreign alike have stepped up international sourcing of components and finished products to serve various markets since an increasing portion of global competition is shaped by european and japanese multinational firms with due emphasis on product quality and manufacturing it is an opportune time to examine the like among their product development manufacturing and sourcing activities those european and japanese multinational firms marketing products in the united states are chosen as subjects of this study

equity compensation and the sensitivity of research and development to financial market frictions abstract when financial market frictions exist executives may have to decide which investment activities to reduce when internal funds decrease expenditures on research and development r d may be particularly vulnerable because of the long term nature of innovative activity we find that equity compensation is associated with lower levels of firm r d expenditures rewarding executives to incur more risk has little effect on r d expenditures but rewarding executives for higher returns reduces r d expenditures and makes r d expenditures more sensitive to financial market frictions in contrast cash compensation reduces the sensitivity of r d expenditures to financial market frictions

a clash of capitalisms foreign shareholders and corporate restructuring in 1990s japan this article examines the clash between stakeholder and shareholder based business systems resulting from an increase in foreign portfolio investment in the japanese economy during the 1990s an analysis of 1 108 firms between 1991 and 2000 shows that as foreign institutional investors who were more interested in investment returns than in long term relationships replaced domestic shareholders one fundamental pillar of japan s stakeholder capitalism began to crack japanese firms began to adopt downsizing and asset divestiture practices more characteristic of anglo american shareholder economies the influence of foreigners however was weaker in firms more deeply embedded in the local system through close ties to domestic financial institutions and corporate groups thus foreign investors were influential primarily in firms less embedded in the existing stakeholder system this research contributes to debates on globalization and convergence of business systems institutional change and corporate

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

introducing financial frictions and unemployment into a small open economy model the current nancial crisis has made it abundantly clear that business cycle modeling no longer can abstract from nancial factors it is also becoming increasingly clear that the stylized modeling of labor markets without explicit unemployment that is the current standard approach has its limitations some questions which the dominating extant business cycle models are mute on but that we would like to answer are how important are nancial and labor market frictions for the business cycle dynamics of a

trends in the substitution of production factors to technology empirical analysis of the inducing impact of the energy crisis on japanese industrial abstract japan successfully overcame the energy crises of 1973 and 1979 maintaining productivity in the face of drastically increased energy prices despite the fragile nature of its energy structure this was due to technological innovation efforts that led to rapid improvement in japan s industrial technology as a whole this paper tries to prove this hypothesis on the basis of an examination of the trends in the substitution of production factors by technology as represented by r d investment efforts since the first energy crisis in 1973 there have been a number of attempts to identify the possibility of substitutability of energy by other production factors but none have been successful in taking technology into account this paper tackles this subject on the basis of the measurement of the technological knowledge stock and en empirical analysis using a translog cost function incorporating this stock and shows that over the last two decades all production factors have been substituted by technology in japan s manufacturing industry or have been moving towards that direction

research and development human capital and trade performance in technology intensive manufactures a cross country analysis abstract this paper comprises an extensive examination of the relationship between commonly utilized policy indicators of national technological capability and observed trade success in technology intensive manufactures across 52 countries in the 1980s a central focus is the relative performance of policy indicators which directly measure innovative activity such as patent output and expenditure and employed scientists and engineers in r d versus those measuring general efforts at increasing national levels of human capital the study design is guided by the inter country intrasectoral approach outlined by dosi et al 19 it emphasizes differences in trade performance based on the notion of international competitiveness but also compares results for conventional revealed comparative advantage indices the large number of countries included and the nature of the policy objectives adopted have necessitated a highly aggregated approach using nation wide attributes and trade in one broad technologyintensive sector as the measure of demonstrated international competitiveness simple correlation and multiple regression techniques are used to assess the association of four main sets of national attributes indicators of direct innovative activity general human capital development physical capital formation and natural resource endowment with technology intensive trade performance the empirical findings provide further support for the importance of national differences in technological capability as a determinant of structural and international competitiveness within the technology intensive sector of production they suggest that policy indicators measuring actual innovative activity and physical capital formation have a much closer link to technology intensive trade than the general educational effort or output indicators demand side measures which proxy the actual employment and application of resources for r d purposes demonstrate the strength of association required for reliable policy evaluation of real national differences in technological capability the poor performance of the general human capital supply variables highlights the need for a careful consideration of the optimality of the allocation of substantial levels of scarce national resources to broad based educational output a number of other significant results concerning the link between technology indicators technology intensive trade and economic performance are discussed

private versus public ownership investment ownership distribution and optimality examined in this paper is the choice between private and public incorporation of an asset for an entrepreneur asset owner who hires a manager with superior information about the asset s return distribution public sale of equity is shown to be the preferred alternative when a capital market issue costs are low or b the asset s idiosyncratic risk is high and the owner is either sufficiently risk averse or sufficiently optimistic about the asset s expected return thus those as sets deemed most valuable by their owners will tend to be publicly incorporated the paper also explores the impact of incorporation mode private versus public and information structure on the firm s investment policy and ownership distribution the determinants of corporate ownership structure have attracted much attention see for example demsetz and lehn 7 the recent spate of leveraged buyouts lbo s and other activities designed to consolidate ownership structure and often to take it out of the public domain have raised questions about the optimality of public ownership of corporations a related issue is the link between real output and the mode of incorporation in firms with a separation of ownership and control do privately incorporated firms have systematically different investment policies from publicly incorporated firms if so aggregate output must be a function of the cross sectional distribution of incorporation modes in the economy there is also considerable interest in the impact of insider information a topic that concerns us in this paper we have two principal objectives the first is to explore the conditions that determine an asset owner s choice of incorporation for the asset that is when would the owner prefer to keep asset ownership private as opposed to having a portion of that ownership publicly traded in particular what is the role of the owner s perception of the value of the asset in this determination are the assets being taken privately more or less valuable than those that are publicly traded insights on this score should help in understanding corporate ownership structure evolution our second objective is to examine the impact of information structure symmetric versus asymmetric information and the firm s incorporation

the determinants of corporate capital structure japanese evidence this paper features a cross sectional regression analysis of the determinants of the company debt to value ratios of a sample of 125 japanese industrial and commercial companies for the period 1980 1983 inclusive the regression equations include a set of dummy variables designed to capture industry effects and a number of other variables acting as proxies for likely determinants of debt ratios suggested in the empirical literature such as profitability non debt tax shields risk etc the results are consistent with the existence of industry effects and suggest that paralleling recent american findings profitability is the most significant determinant of japanese company debt ratios

why are japanese firms so innovative in engineering technology abstract japanese firms belonging to the electric and electronics industry have been producing a large number of innovations concentrated in the field of engineering technology and directly related to commercial products one reason why japanese firms have such characteristics can be explained by their unique behavior and organization of research and development r d the behavior of the r d division of japanese firms is characterized by less independence from other divisions of the firms a close relationship with other divisions and concerted behavior to maximize total corporate profits these are indicated by the fact that r d funds are allocated flexibly by taking into account the intentions of other operational divisions or the headquarter s office and the fact that there exists a unique career path in a japanese firm by which r d personnel do not always stay in the research division but are frequently assigned to other various divisions as they climb upward however these structural and behavioral characteristics of japanese corporate r d which so far have been efficient in applied research and product development are not adaptable to basic research recently japanese firms are seeking a new r d organization and management system to solve the problem

loan availability and investment can innovative companies better cope with loan denials this study examines the consequences of loan denials for the investment performance of small and medium sized german enterprises as a consequence of a loan denial innovative companies experience a smaller drop in the share of actual to planned investment than noninnovative companies the nonrandomness of loan denials is controlled for with a selection equation employing the intensity of banking competition at the district level as an exclusion restriction we can explain the better performance of innovative companies by their ability to increase the use of external equity financing such as venture capital or mezzanine capital when facing a loan denial

small and medium sized enterprises bank relationship strength and the use of venture capital we investigate the nexus between small and medium sized enterprises smes use of venture capital and bank financing relationships using a unique data set with detailed information on sme finance in italy germany and the uk the empirical regularities we uncover show that that entrepreneurial firms substitute venture capital for multiple banking relationships this substitution effect is primarily driven by expertise substitution and there is also some suggestive yet inconclusive indication in the data that smes turn to providers of venture capital to avoid rent extracting behavior by the firm s main bank our results do not support the view that firms obtain venture capital in instances when bank financing is difficult to obtain instead venture capital funds are used if bank funding is deemed not appropriate and firms do seem to be aware of which type of financing is more appropriate for them

the stability of short term interest rates pass through in the euro area during the financial market and sovereign debt crises we analyse the dynamics of the pass through of banks marginal cost to bank lending rates over the 2008 crisis and the euro area sovereign debt crisis in france germany greece italy portugal and spain we measure banks marginal cost by their rate on new deposits contrary to the literature that focuses on money market rates this allows us to account for banks risks we focus on the interest rate on new short term loans granted to non financial corporations in these countries our analysis is based on an error correction approach that we extend to handle the time varying long run relationship between banks lending rates and banks marginal cost as well as stochastic volatility our application is based on a harmonised monthly database from january 2003 to october 2014 we estimate the model within a bayesian framework using markov chain monte carlo methods mcmc we reject the view that the transmission mechanism is permanent over time the long run relationship moved with the sovereign debt crises to a new one with a slower pass through and higher bank lending rates its developments are heterogeneous from one country to the other impediments to the transmission of monetary rates depend on the heterogeneity in banks marginal costs and therefore its risks we also find that rates to small firms increase compared to large firms in a few countries using a var model we show that overall the effect of a shock on the rate of new deposits on the unexpected variances of new loans has been less important since 2010 these results confirm the slowdown in the transmission mechanism

financial shocks and the us business cycle employing the financial accelerator fa model of bernanke gertler and gilchrist 1999 enhanced to include a shock to the fa mechanism we construct and study shocks to the efficiency of the financial sector in post war us business cycles we find that financial shocks are very tightly linked with the onset of recessions more so than tfp or monetary shocks the financial shock invariably remains contractionary for sometime after recessions have ended the shock accounts for a large part of the variance of gdp and is strongly negatively correlated with the external finance premium second moments comparisons across variants of the model with and without a stochastic fa mechanism suggests the stochastic fa model helps us understand the data

conflicting interests in information disclosure and short term orientation of firms abstract this paper explains why firms might be excessively short term oriented even when they are able to inform the capital market about the true quality of their assets the information a firm reveals to the capital market can be used by competitors to the firm s detriment in this case the future profitability of the firm s assets is no longer exogenous but is influenced by the strategic actions of its competitors which in turn depend on the information the firm discloses this motivates the firm to switch resources from future prospects to short term profits the results have policy implications and may help explain the empirical observation that u s firms tend to be more short term oriented than japanese firms

strategic and financial performance implications of global sourcing strategy a contingency analysis using a contingency model of global sourcing strategy this study investigated the moderating effects of sourcing related factors on the relationship between sourcing strategy and a product s strategic and financial performance the results lent some support to the contingency model of global sourcing strategy in that product innovation process innovation and asset specificity were significant moderator variables for financial but not strategic performance however the results provided no support for bargaining power of suppliers and transaction frequency as moderator variables in other words in achieving high financial performance for a product whether a particular sourcing strategy should be used for a particular product depended on the levels of product innovation process innovation and asset specificity

optimal patents with compulsory licensing this paper examines the use of compulsory lincensing as a policy to combat the monopoly problem associated with the patent system it introduces the notion of an optimal patent one where the patent life and the licensing royalty rate are both determined optimally under certain simplifying assumptions it is shown that the optimal patent will have an indefinite life for both process and product innovations some preliminary calculations suggest that the use of compulsory licensing may lead to substantial welfare improvements even if the patent life is left unchanged at 17 years

recovery rates default probabilities and the credit cycle in recessions the number of defaulting firms rises on top of this the average amount recovered on the bonds of defaulting firms tends to decrease this paper proposes an econometric model in which this joint time variation in default rates and recovery rate distributions is driven by an unobserved markov chain which we interpret as the credit cycle this model is shown to fit better than models in which this joint time variation is driven by observed macroeconomic variables we use the model to quantitatively assess the importance of allowing for systematic time variation in recovery rates which is often ignored in risk management and pricing models

the effect of pre emptive right amendments on shareholder wealth abstract pre emptive rights allow existing shareholders to purchase a new offering of shares before the general public this paper investigates the effect on shareholder wealth of removing pre emptive rights from corporate charters two hypotheses are constrasted 1 shareholder wealth maximization suggests that management uses this extra degree of freedom to pick the least cost method for raising new equity hence the amendment increases shareholder wealth 2 management welfare maximization holds that management will use the passage of the amendment to maximize their own welfare sometimes to the detriment of shareholders hence the amendment decreases shareholder wealth the evidence indicates that the amendment decreases shareholder wealth

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

on the importance of sectoral and regional shocks for price setting summary we use novel disaggregate sectoral regional euro area data to investigate the sources of price changes introducing a new method to extract factors from overlapping data blocks that allows for estimation of aggregate sectoral country specific and regional components of price changes our sectoral component explains much less variation in disaggregate inflation rates and exhibits much less volatility and more persistence than previous findings for the us indicate country and region specific factors play an important role emphasizing heterogeneity of inflation dynamics along both sectoral and geographical dimensions our results are incompatible with basic sticky information or calvo type price setting models but require multi sector multi country models copyright 2015 john wiley sons ltd

patents vs trade secrets knowledge licensing and spillover we develop a model of two stage cumulative research and development rd yet the contracting parties choose the closed sale whenever the interim knowledge is more valuable and leakage is sufficiently high if the extent of leakage is lower more rus choose open sales generating a nonmonotonic relationship between the strength of intellectual property rights and aggregate r d expenditures and the overall likelihood of development by either du jel d23 o32 o34

dynamics in innovation systems evidence from japan s game software industry in contrast to the us and recently europe japan appears to be unsuccessful in establishing new industries an oft cited example is japan s practical invisibility in the global business software sector literature has ascribed japan s weakness or conversely america s strength to the specific institutional settings and competences of actors within the respective national innovation system it has additionally been argued that unlike the american innovation system with its proven ability to give birth to new industries the inherent path dependency of the japanese innovation system makes innovation and establishment of new industries quite difficult however there are two notable weaknesses underlying current propositions postulating that only certain innovation systems enable the creation of new industries first they mistakenly confound context specific with general empirical observations and second they grossly underestimate or altogether fail to examine the dynamics within innovation systems this paper will show that it is precisely the dynamics within innovation systems dynamics founded on the concept of path plasticity which have enabled japan to charge forward as a global leader in a highly innovative field the game software sector 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved