inflation and economic growth in an open developing country the case of brazil this articles studies the relationship between inflation and gdp growth after trade and financial liberalisation in brazil the aim is to provide an explanation for the inverse relationship between economic growth and inflation verified in this economy in the considered period tradeable and non tradeable inflation experiences are studied separately for this purpose the article suggests a model for the relationship between inflation and economic growth under the cost based price approach the model is estimated for the case of brazil confirming the relationships postulated in the article

does government r d policy mainly benefit scientists and engineers conventional wisdom holds that the social rate of return to r d significantly exceeds the private rate of return and therefore r d should be subsidized in the u s the government has directly funded a large fraction of total r d spending this paper shows that there is a serious problem with such government efforts to increase inventive activity the majority of r d spending is actually just salary payments for r d workers their labor supply however is quite inelastic so when the government funds r d a significant fraction of the increased spending goes directly into higher wages using cps data on wages of scientific personnel this paper shows that government r d spending raises wages significantly particularly for scientists related to defense such as physicists and aeronautical engineers because of the higher wages conventional estimates of the effectiveness of r d policy may be 30 to 50 too high the results also imply that by altering the wages of scientists and engineers even for firms not receiving federal support government funding directly crowds out private inventive activity this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

how optimal distinctiveness affects new ventures failure risk a contingency perspective abstract in this article we apply the concept of optimal distinctiveness to test whether category spanning has a nonlinear effect on new ventures risk to fail we argue that by being optimally distinct i e by attaining a level of category spanning that allows new ventures to benefit from balancing the competing needs of conformity with and differentiation from competitors new ventures can improve their survival chances in addition we argue that the relevance of optimal distinctiveness varies with a venture s age and a category s density we tested our hypotheses using data from 1668 metal bands that were founded in the united kingdom between 1967 and 2005 the results indicate that optimal distinctiveness is relevant to new ventures failure risk moreover we show that venture age attenuates the relevance of optimal distinctiveness whereas category density strengthens that factor s relevance

the impact of regulations on the supply and quality of care in child care markets we examine the impact of state child care regulations on the supply and quality of care in child care markets we exploit panel data on both individual establishments and local markets to control for state time and where possible establishment specific fixed effects to mitigate the potential bias due to policy endogeneity we find that the imposition of regulations reduces the number of center based child care establishments especially in lower income markets however such regulations increase the quality of services provided especially in higher income areas thus there are winners and losers from the regulation of child care services

the big bug the legitimation of the edible insect sector in the netherlands abstract this study analyzes the legitimation process of an emerging novel food sector in the european union eu current eu policies are cautious with regard to new food sources and new food technology and we aim to determine how the sector is addressing both this caution as well as a general public that may be skeptical of its products by utilizing a legitimacy strategy framework and conducting 19 semi structured interviews with actors and experts in the dutch edible insect sector we assess the sector s progress and limitations with regard to its legitimacy journey the findings show that sector focus has thus far been on organization intraindustry and interindustry legitimacy strategies and that additional emphasis on institutional strategies will be imperative to securing more accommodating legislation in addition the lack of a common vision a strategic communication plan and interfirm linkages may also be hindering sector legitimation the framework and conclusions presented here may prove useful to other sectors introducing novel foods

price behaviour in the italian manufacturing industry abstract this paper sets out to test the hypothesis that the price cost margins of italian manufacturing industries are influenced by excess domestic demand and by international prices of manufactured products using annual data 1956 1982 a mark up equation is estimated for each of the twelve industries in which the manufacturing sector has been disaggregated the ratio of industry price to average total cost is functionally related to the ratio of international price to domestic cost and a measure of excess demand on the basis of the estimates which are obtained by maximum likelihood techniques and some specification tests it is concluded that both factors influence pricing behaviour although their effect is not uniformly significant in every sector

dynamic competition and price adjustments the link between price rigidity and market structure has long been a topic of interest to researchers in both macroeconomics and industrial organization research on this subject with its antecedents in the widely debated topic of administered inflation has gone through several stages in recent years the focus of research has been on explaining the speed of price adjustment 8 7 11 4 2 3 a parallel line of research has been on the role of entry in disciplining the price behavior of incumbent firms 15 14 5 the current study extends previous work on price adjustment in several important ways most importantly we introduce dynamic elements of competition as measured by several disaggregated measures of domestic and import entry we are able to evaluate the extent to which price effects of entry into u s manufacturing are due to changes in desired prices or to changes in the speed of adjustment to desired prices we depart from previous studies in that we use pooled data to estimate by nonlinear regression methods both the desired target price change and the speed of adjustment across industries

human capital information and the early adoption of new technology when producers are uncertain or have imperfect information about the profitability of adopting new technology their adoption behavior depends on the endowment of human capital and the investment in adoption information this study analyzes the role of education experience and information acquisition in the decision to be an early adopter the findings support the hypothesis that adoption decision making is a human capital intensive activity the econometric evidence presented suggests that education and information reduce adoption costs and uncertainty and thereby raise the probability of early adoption adoption behavior is also shown to vary significantly across firm size

the effect of information on product quality evidence from restaurant hygiene grade cards this study examines the effect of an increase in product quality information to consumers on e rms choices of product quality in 1998 los angeles county introduced hygiene quality grade cards to be displayed in restaurant windows we show that the grade cards cause i restaurant health inspection scores to increase ii consumer demand to become sensitive to changes in restaurants hygiene quality and iii the number of foodborne illness hospitalizations to decrease we also provide evidence that this improvement in health outcomes is not fully explained by consumers substituting from poor hygiene restaurants to good hygiene restaurants these results imply that the grade cards cause restaurants to make hygiene quality improvements

incidence of strict quality standards protection of consumers or windfall for professionals abstractthis paper examines the effects of upgrading product quality standards on product and professional labor market equilibriums when both markets are regulated the japanese government revised the building standards act in june 2007 requiring a stricter review process for approving the plans of large scale buildings this regulatory change increased the wages of certified architects in tokyo by 30 percent but did not increase their total hours worked because of an inelastic labor supply the stricter quality standards created a quasi rent for certified architects and owners of condominiums at a cost to consumers evidence suggests that the new standards increased the transaction price of existing condominiums by 15 percent in the tokyo metropolitan area

the adoption of interrelated innovations a human capital approach a hstract this paper develops a model of the decision to adopt interrelated innovations emphasizing the role of innovative ability and a measure of the economic incentive to be informed about innovations education experience and the availability of information are hypothesized to be measurable dimensions of innovative ability the results from fitting univariate conditional and joint logistic models suggest that innovative ability contributes significantly to explaining the adoption of new technology but does not explain its diffusion the results also indicate that the diffusion of previously available innovations depends on the introduction and adoption of interrelated current innovations

determinants of price adjustment this paper reports results of an empirical study investigating the adjustment speed of prices to change in costs and demand particular emphasis is laid on the impact of concentration on the adjustment speed in addition the effects of the business cycle and capital intensity are considered it shows that concentrated industries tend to adjust prices faster while capital intensity has a negative impact prices are more flexible during an upswing than in times of a recession

industrial policy and the creation of new industries evidence from brazil s bioethanol industry industrial policy programs are frequently used by governments to stimulate economic activity in particular sectors of the economy this study explores how an industrial policy program can affect the creation and evolution of an industry and ultimately the long term performance of firms we examine the history of the brazilian bioethanol industry focusing on the industrial policy program implemented by the brazilian government in the 1970s to develop the industry we put together a novel data set containing detailed information about the history of bioethanol producers our findings show that plants founded during the industrial policy program tend to be in the long run more productive than those founded before the program was in place based on additional analyses and complementary fieldwork we infer that the wave of acquisitions that occurred after the end of the industrial policy program had an important effect on the performance of the plants founded when the program was in place industrial policy especially in conjunction with a competitive post industrial policy business landscape can succeed in nurturing competitive firms

price dynamics in uk manufacturing a microeconomic view this paper examines the response of prices to cost and demand shocks in seventy five three digit and four digit industries in the united kingdom during the 1980s the results suggest that prices responded sluggishly to costs but virtually not at all to demand the short run response to materials and fuel shocks was much larger than the response to unit labor cost shocks and some of this difference persisted into the long run prices responded more sluggishly to cost and demand shocks when aggregate inflation was lower and finally pricing dynamics were more sluggish in less competitive industries copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

the imprint of labor markets on entrepreneurial performance abstract using the 1979 2010 waves of the national longitudinal survey of youth our study tracks the earnings of individual entrepreneurs from the beginning of their entrepreneurial careers examining the effects of labor markets on their earnings trajectory results show that apart from self selection labor markets impose a penalty on the initial earnings of entrepreneurs who start a business in adverse economic conditions a disadvantage that persists for up to a decade we also identify two factors expected to alleviate the imprinting effect of labor markets migration outside the imprinting environment and serial entrepreneurship

investment moral hazard and occupational licensing i analyse occupational licensing as an input regulation that requires minimum levels of human capital investment by professionals by raising professionals training levels licensing helps alleviate moral hazard problems associated with the provision of high quality services i also consider certification whereby consumers are provided information about professionals training levels i show that licensing and certification tend to benefit consumers who value quality highly at the expense of those who do not licensing may raise total surplus if sellers investments are not observable but is pareto worsening if training levels are observable certification may however lead to excessive investment as a signalling device and thus be pareto inferior to either licensing or to a policy of laissez faire

the influence of cost and demand changes on the rate of change of prices 1982 the influence of cost and demand changes on the rate of change of prices applied economics vol 14 no 2 pp 195 209

legitimacy vacuum structural imprinting and the first mover disadvantage unfavorable conditions at founding may result in consistently lower survival chances for new firms we focus on the effect of market entry in the early years of an industry when clarity about the

price rigidity inflation and market concentration some canadian evidence from the 1970s in the literature on industrial pricing there is a long standing dispute over the theoretical rationale for and the empirical validity of price rigidity briefly the arguments is that the speed of price adjustment is a function of market structure in competitive markets prices are flexible they adjust rapidly to supply and demand shocks but in oligopoly they can be relatively rigid they adjust only slowly if it all to these same shocks 1 but because the theoretical basis fot the rigidity hypothesis is decidedly ad hoc it is often summarily dismissed 2 empirically however a number of studies for various countries and time period have found relationship between concentration a proxy for oligopolistic market structure and price change and or some other measure of the speed of price adjustment compatible with price rigidity 3 although these result are not totally unambiguous 4 the canadian evidence at least prior to the 1970s strongly supports the rigidity hypothesis sellekaerts and l

analyzing the extent and influence of occupational licensing on the labor market this study examines occupational licensing in the united states using a specially designed national labor force survey estimates from the survey indicated that 35 of employees were either licensed or certified by the government and that 29 were licensed another 3 stated that all who worked in their job would eventually be required to be certified or licensed bringing the total that are or eventually must be licensed or certified by government to 38 we find that licensing is associated with about 18 higher wages but that the effect of governmental certification on pay is much smaller

impact of informal institutions on the prevalence strategy and performance of family firms a meta analysis family controlled firms fcfs prevalence strategies and performance differ across countries we explain these differences through the lens of informal institutions suggesting that different countries have different levels of appreciation for family business to capture this effect we introduce the construct of family business legitimacy fbl and an associated index fbli we empirically measure fbli scores for 83 countries spanning both developed and emerging economies by combining meta analytic and archival data we show that fcfs prevail follow unique strategies and outperform non fcfs in countries with high fbli scores as a new contingency variable fbl advances the literature on the informal institutional embeddedness of organizations and family business

toward a construct of liability of origin in this paper we advance a novel concept of liability of origin to explicate the mechanisms through which location can be become either a liability or an advantage our analysis sheds light on how firms ability to compete and gain legitimacy can be derailed or enhanced by their geographical location we illustrate our theoretical analysis using multiple cases in the airline industry in africa four distinct phases that explicate how liability of origin manifests in firms legitimacy quest are indicated our work highlights how actions and inactions of rival firms can make the geographical origin of a firm geographicalness to shift from being a strategic asset to become a liability we outline a number of implications for practice and fruitful avenues for future research