knowledge spillovers and patent citations evidence from a survey of inventors it is well understood that the non rival nature of knowledge as a productive asset creates the possibility of knowledge spillovers whereby investments in knowledge creation by one party produce external benefits by facilitating innovation by other parties at least since zvi griliches s 1979 seminal paper on measuring the contributions of r d to economic growth economists have been attempting to quantify the extent and impact of knowledge spillovers one line of research of this type has utilized patent citations to identify a paper trail that may be associated with knowledge flows between firms very little of this research has attempted to determine the modes or mechanisms of communication that actually permit knowledge to flow further most of the work has simply assumed that citations or other proxies are sufficiently correlated with knowledge flows to allow statistical analysis of the proxies to be informative regarding the underlying phenomenon of interest this paper reports on a preliminary attempt to improve this situation the idea for this survey came from r d managers whom we were interviewing to test whether the picture of knowledge flows produced by patent citations was consistent with the managers impressions one of these managers commented that he could not let us talk to the scientists who worked for him but that he could not stop uls from contacting them via the postal address that appears on their issued patents the survey results suggest that communication between inventors is reasonably irnportant and that patent citations do provide an indication of communication albeit one that also carries a fair amount of noise

the impact of the 1992 cable act on household demand and welfare i measure the benefit to households of the 1992 cable act in light of strategic responses by cable systems to the regulations mandated by the act a discrete choice differentiatedproduct model of household demand for all offered cable television services forms the basis of the analysis aggregation over households and service combinations to the level of the data permits estimation on a cross section of cable markets from before and after the act the results indicate that while the regulations mandated price reductions of 10 17 for cable services observed system responses yielded no change in household welfare post act changes in cable prices are responsible for most of the difference

efficiency in the factoring industry the efficiency and productivity in the italian factoring industry between 1993 and 1997 is investigated using dea the factoring industry is an important part of many financial systems and it has established itself as a major source of finance and credit management for a growing number of companies however as far as the authors are aware no studies have applied frontier methodologies to examine the efficiency and productivity of this industry this paper focuses on the italian market the second largest in the world after the uk the results suggest that there are substantial cost savings to be had in the italian factoring industry the mean cost inefficiency in the italian factoring industry over the period 1993 1997 ranged between 14 and 22 these inefficiencies are mainly generated by allocative rather than technical inefficiencies scale and technical inefficiencies seem to be similar in magnitude and the supposed importance of the latter typically found in the banking efficiency literature are n

a note on the malmquist productivity index in recent years the malmquist index has gained in popularity as a measure of productivity change we demonstrate that in the presence of non constant returns to scale the malmquist productivity index does not accurately measure productivity change the bias is systematic and depends on the magnitude of scale economies

bootstrapping the data envelopment analysis malmquist productivity index this paper presents a bootstrap approach to calculate confidence intervals for firm specific malmquist productivity indices obtained from data envelopment analysis dea models the bootstrap is easily implemented and allows identification of production units that have significant productivity changes an application using data from swedish eye care departments is included we find that 40 of departments have significant progress in productivity whereas only 10 of the departments have a significant regress in productivity this differs from the original results where about half the sample have estimates of progress and the other half have estimates of regress in productivity

state lottery adoptions as policy innovations an event history analysis two types of explanations of state government innovation have been proposed internal determinants models which posit that the factors causing a state government to innovate are political economic and social characteristics of a state and regional diffusion models which point toward the role of policy adoptions by neighboring states in prompting a state to adopt we show that the two are conceptually compatible relying on mohr s theory of organizational innovation then we develop and test a unified explanation of state lottery adoptions reflecting both internal and regional influences the empirical results provide a great degree of support for mohr s theory for the empirical analysis we rely on event history analysis a form of pooled cross sectional time series analysis which we believe may be useful in a wide variety of subfields of political science event history analysis may be able to explain important forms of political behavior by individuals organizations or governments even if they occur only rarely

affirmative action in higher education how do admission and financial aid rules affect future earnings this paper addresses how changing the admission and financial aid rules at colleges affects future earnings i estimate a structural model of the following decisions by individuals where to submit applications which school to attend and what field to study the model also includes decisions by schools as to which students to accept and how much financial aid to offer simulating how black educational choices would change were they to face the white admission and aid rules shows that race based advantages had little effect on earnings however removing race based advantages does affect black educational outcomes in particular removing advantages in admissions substantially decreases the number of black students at top tier schools while removing advantages in financial aid causes a decrease in the number of blacks who attend college

convergence in oecd countries technical change efficiency and productivity the aim of this study is to analyse labour productivity convergence in the oecd countries over the period 1975 90 a nonparametric frontier approach is used to calculate the malmquist productivity index by breaking it down the contribution in the growth of labour productivity of technical progress of changes in efficiency and of the accumulation of inputs per worker are quantified unlike other studies the results obtained show that technical change has worked against labour productivity convergence since it has always been greater in the countries with higher labour productivity

a comprehensive eco efficiency model and dynamics of regional eco efficiency in china abstract in order to have a comprehensive eco efficiency measure which can incorporate productivity resource efficiency environmental efficiency and inter temporal comparability and circularity the paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model named gb us sbm model which combines global benchmark technology undesirable output super efficiency and slacks based measure using the gb us sbm model this paper investigates the dynamics of regional eco efficiency in china from 2000 to 2010 the empirical results show that the movement of average eco efficiency of china presents a v shape from 2000 to 2010 with the trough occurred in 2005 but there are big differences of eco efficiency among the regions for the growth of eco efficiency technological progress contributes 56 87 58 21 18 27 62 19 scale efficiency contributes 40 01 61 14 167 43 39 12 efficiency change contributes 3 82 19 99 63 40 2 16 to the eastern middle western and northeastern regions of china respectively these imply that there is a big space for western region to enhance its technological progress and huge space for the whole country to promote its management ability

total factor productivity and the convergence hypothesis in the italian regions this article is aimed at testing the catching up hypothesis for the italian regions the use of malmquist productivity indices allows to decompose productivity growth into technological progress and technical efficiency change interpreted respectively as innovation and catching up measurements the analysis leads to a conclusion that regional economies diverge at a decreasing rate

modelling price dispersion as an outcome of competition in the irish grocery market the paper empirically models price dispersion between related brands within product categories of the irish independent grocery market retail brand prices are averaged over the independent shops stocking the brand since individual brands are retailed through different groups of shops brands are priced over heterogeneous consumer segments brand price dispersion is estimated to increase with competition when conditioned on brand distribution structures while controlling for other observed and unobserved deterministic factors the data suggest that brand pricing across consumer groups induce varying degrees of localised price competition rather than pricing across segments to extract consumer willingness to pay

future governance of innovation policy in europe three scenarios in europe public research technology and innovation policies are no longer exclusively in the hands of national authorities increasingly national initiatives are supplemented by or even competing with regional innovation policies or transnational programmes in particular the activities of the european union at the same time industrial innovation increasingly occurs within international networks are we witnessing a change of governance in european innovation policy based on a set of hypotheses concerning the co evolution of political systems and innovation systems in europe the paper speculates about the future governance of innovation policies trying to pave the ways for empirical analyses it sketches three scenarios stretching from 1 the idea of an increasingly centralised and dominating european innovation policy arena to 2 the opposite i e a progressive decentralisation and open competition between partly strengthened partly weakened national or regional innovation systems and finally to 3 the vision of a centrally mediated mixture of competition and co operation between diverse regional innovation cultures and a related governance structure

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency in their comment subhash c ray and evangelia desli 1997 hereafter rd point out that the specification of the decomposition of the malmquist productivity index used by fare et al 1994 hereafter fgnz is not unique and propose and compute an alternative specification of that decomposition we will discuss additional decompositions at the end of this note but proceed here by comparing the rd decomposition with fgnz based on both conceptual and computational grounds rd provide a discussion of the overall malmquist productivity index including the important issue of when this index is equivalent to the traditional notion of total factor productivity tfp namely under the condition that the reference technology be consistent with constant returns to scale crs as they point out this will yield a measure of tfp even if the true underlying technology is not crs for example both rd and fgnz use the crs reference technology to compute overall malmquist productivity one of the key issues raised is the role of the underlying scale properties of the benchmark technologies used to define and compute both productivity and its components in particular two reference technologies are employed in both rd and fgnz what we refer to as crs and variable returns to scale vrs technologies by construction these technologies are nested the crs technology contains the vrs technology as in figure 1 in rd this nestedness provides the logical basis for our decomposition at a very intuitive level we would argue that these two benchmarks can be used to provide bounds on the underlying true but unknown technology 2 intuitively we see the vrs technology providing a type of convex inner approximation whereas the crs technology provides a type of convex outer approximation thus these two technologies provide alternative benchmarks they do not require that the data satisfy either crs or vrs another possible intuitive interpretation is that the crs captures a perhaps hypothetical long run and the vrs approximates the short run as a reference technology the crs technology has some very useful features for example it captures the notion of maximal

agricultural productivity of the spanish regions a non parametric malmquist analysis productivity growth for the agricultural sectors of the 17 spanish regions over the period 1977 88 is studied using non parametric programming techniques productivity changes based on conventional inputs are linked to other economic geographic and institutional issues average technical change in the spanish regions grew at an annual rate of 2 9 but with great regional variation this paper presents a clear characterization of areas with greater technical progress and the regions with technical regress

has china s fast industrial growth been efficient an industry level investigation with a newly constructed data set we adopt contemporaneous nonradial and variable returns to scale assumptions in a data envelopment analysis dea exercise to address the inefficiency problem in chinese industries in different policy regimes using a newly constructed data set for 24 chinese manufacturing industries in 1952 2008 while confirming that the central planning period was indeed a graveyard for productivity that entailed severe technical regress and efficiency losses we do not find a steady improvement in efficiency during the reform period despite strong technical progress we argue that the resurgent prominence of the government and the state sector since the late 1990s especially following china s world trade organization accession has obstructed the efficiency improvement

price discrimination in free entry markets using a spatial model of monopolistic competition we investigate price discrimination in free entry zero profit markets we show that when brands are heterogeneous competition does not prevent discrimination the power to earn economic profits is not necessary for a firm to maintain discriminatory prices our model treats formally the fact that consumers difer not only in the utility they derive from a good but also in how strongly they prefer one brand over all others in markets where firms are very competitive sorting consumers on the strength on brand preference produces larger price differentials between groups than sorting on the basis of consumers reservation prices for the good when firms sort customers on the basis of strength of brand preference however we find that the output and welfare effects are generally less favorable than when sorting is more closely related to consumers reservation prices

the welfare impact of medicare hmos we estimate the welfare associated with the medicare hmo program now known as medicare choice m c we find that the creation of the m c program resulted in approximately 15 6 billion in consumer surplus and 52 billion in profits from 1993 to 2000 in 2000 dollars this program most likely generated significant net social welfare however we find that consumer surplus is geographically unevenly distributed prescription drug coverage accounts for approximately 45 of the estimated consumer surplus for 2000 consumer surplus increases in the number of plans in a county and most of the increase in welfare is due to increased premium competition

public procurement and innovation resurrecting the demand side abstract demand is a major potential source of innovation yet the critical role of demand as a key driver of innovation has still to be recognised in government policy this article discusses public procurement as one of the key elements of a demand oriented innovation policy the paper starts by signaling the new significance of public procurement for innovation policy strategies at the eu level and in a range of european countries it then defines the concept of public procurement and embeds this concept within a taxonomy of innovation policies the rationales and justifications of public procurement policies to spur innovation are discussed followed by a consideration of the challenges and potential pitfalls as well as appropriate institutional arrangements and strategies including some recent empirical examples of good practice it concludes by confronting the public procurement approach with two of the most common objections to it and by considering future prospects

the verticality of policy mixes for sustainability transitions a case study of solar water heating in china abstract climate change and sustainable development are the defining challenges of the modern era the field of sustainability transitions seeks systematic solutions for fundamental transformations of socio technical systems towards sustainability and exploring the role of policy mixes has been a central research agenda within the field in the extant literature there exists a lack of both conceptual and empirical research on the vertical dimension of policy mixes for sustainability transitions this study provides a multilevel and evolutionary interpretation of the vertical interactions of policy mixes in the process of industrial path development towards sustainability transitions an exemplary case of solar water heating swh technology in shandong province in china is presented capturing both the bottom up and top down processes of interactions on the one hand urban level policy initiatives can inform higher level policymaking on the other hand national level priorities can greatly configure policy strategies for lower level governments moreover as the industry matures the interactions of multilevel policy mixes evolve from simpler unidirectional patterns to more complex bidirectional ones through a vertical policy learning feedback mechanism this study generates two important policy implications that extend beyond the chinese context first dynamic vertical interactions between multilevel governments indicate the need to develop more nuanced perspectives on the design of policy mixes second policy makers need to hold a more dynamic view of policy mixes by recognizing their temporal and coevolutionary nature through the policy learning process

technological change efficiency gains and capital accumulation in labour productivity growth and convergence an application to the spanish regions the main objective of this article is to analyse labour productivity growth and convergence in the spanish regions between 1965 and 1995 decomposing total factor productivity gains into technological progress and efficiency change by means of malmquist productivity indices on the basis of this decomposition labour productivity growth is broken down into components attributable to technological change shifts in the frontier efficiency gains movements toward the frontier and capital accumulation movements along the frontier the approach followed in this study is based on work initiated by fare et al where a link between the economic growth and convergence literature and the production frontier approach was established furthermore in the spirit of quah s approach the evolution of the whole distribution is considered thus the analysis of the dynamics of the entire distribution of labour productivity and the factors behind it technological progress efficiency gains and capital accumulation

multilevel innovation policy mix a closer look at state policies that augment the federal sbir program this paper examines nested multilevel innovation policies paying particular attention to u s federal and state small business innovation research programs with 45 states offering a range of sbir outreach and sbir match programs specifically designed to enhance the federal sbir program such programs provide a useful lens for examining the nature of the multilevel innovation policy mix the contributions of this article are twofold first the article provides theoretical motivation for multilevel innovation policy responses placing emphasis on positive policy responses in which state policies enhance federal policies second the article provides an empirical analysis examining the multilevel factors associated with a state government response that augments the federal sbir program the results from this analysis indicate these state policy actions are associated with a confluence of multilevel factors driven not only from top to down federal actions but also from bottom to up internal state political and economic factors as well as from lateral pressures from peer states

malmquist productivity index decompositions a unifying framework in two widely cited but unpublished working papers simar and wilson 1998 and zofio and lovell 1998 proposed an alternative decomposition of the malmquist productivity index which retained what seemed to be the strongholds of previous proposals with regard to the contribution of technological and efficiency change to productivity change namely a technical change term with regard to the best practice variable returns to scale vrs technology which is to be found in ray and desli 1997 and a scale efficiency change term that illustrates a firm s situation with regard to optimal scale benchmark technology fare et al 1994 attaining this objective required the introduction of an additional term in the malmquist productivity index decomposition which would reflect the scale bias of technical change it is our objective to provide economic rationale for this term within a theory of production context the existing decompositions and recent articles that further elaborate on this issue the ide

does electoral accountability affect economic policy choices evidence from gubernatorial term limits this paper analyzes the behavior of u s governors from 1950 to 1986 to investigate a reputation building model of political behavior we argue that differences in the behavior of governors who face a binding term limit and those who are able to run again provides a source of variation in discount rates that can be used to test a political agency model we find evidence that taxes spending and other policy instruments respond to a binding term limit if a democrat is in office the result is a fiscal cycle in term limit states which lowers state income when the term limit binds

foreign direct investment spillovers and technical efficiency in the indonesian pharmaceutical sector firm level evidence the spillovers of foreign direct investment fdi on domestic firms performances have been highly debated for many years this article contributes to this debate by analysing spillovers effects on technical efficiency of indonesian pharmaceutical sector using a unique unbalanced panel of highly disaggregated at five digit international standard industrial classification isic 210 firms over the period 1990 1995 1001 observations the stochastic production frontier spf and the data envelopment analysis dea based on malmquist productivity indices mpi have been used to test the spillovers effects of fdi on technical efficiency the empirical results from the spf show that foreign firms are more efficient than domestic competitors and the presence of the former increases the inefficiency of the latter similarly the results from the mpi demonstrate that fdi has a negative and significant impact on technical efficiency changes in domestic competitors but generate positive spillovers to domestic s

commodity market dynamics and the joint executive committee 1880 1886 using weekly spot and future commodity prices in chicago and new york we construct expected transportation rates for grain between these two cities expected inventory levels in new york and realized errors in the expectations of such variables we incorporate these exogenous commodity market dynamics into porter s 1983 structural modeling of the joint executive committee railroad cartel as in porter we model marginal cost as a parametric function of instrumented output among other factors unlike porter we model pricing over marginal cost as a nonparametric function of a set of variables which include expectations of deterministic demand cycles and cartel stability we estimate the pricing and demand equation simultaneously and semiparametrically our estimated weekly markups during periods of cartel stability are shown to reflect optimal collusive pricing over deterministic business cycles as modeled in haltiwanger and harrington 1991 periods of cartel instability are proven to be trigger

applied welfare economics with discrete choice models economists have been paying increasing attention to the study of situations in which consumers face a discrete rather than a continuous set of choices such models are potentially very important in evaluating the impact of government programs upon consumer welfare but very little has been said in general regarding the tools of applied welfare economics indiscrete choice situations this paper shows how the conventional methods of applied welfare economics can be modified to handle such cases it focuses on the computation of the excess burden of taxation and the evaluation of quality change the results are applied to stochastic utility models including the popular cases of probit and logit analysis throughout the emphasis is on providing rigorous guidelines for carrying out applied work this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

mergers with differentiated products the case of the ready to eat cereal industry traditional merger analysis is difficult to implement when evaluating mergers in industries with differentiated products i discuss an alternative which consists of demand estimation and the use of a model of postmerger conduct to simulate the competitive effects of a merger i estimate a brand level demand system for ready to eat cereal using supermarket scanner data and use the estimates to 1 recover marginal costs 2 simulate postmerger price equilibria and 3 compute welfare effects under a variety of assumptions the methodology is applied to five mergers two of which occurred and for which i compare predicted to actual outcomes

malmquist indices of productivity change in the uk gas industry before and after privatization the uk government s privatization programme was justified in terms of potential efficiency gains this paper concentrates on measures of technical efficiency in the regions of the uk natural gas industry before and after privatization and the associated regulatory changes it uses non parametric frontier analysis and malmquist indices to show that the rate of productivity growth increased significantly after privatization however the differences in technical efficiency amongst regions remain suggesting that failure to break up the industry has sacrificed potential gains from direct competition or indirect competition through yardstick regulation

coverage of retail stores and discrete choice models of demand estimating price elasticities and welfare effects consumers choice set of products within stores can be limited ackerberg and rysman 2005 address this problem by modeling unobserved consumer preferences over products and retail stores leading to augmented demand speci cations having carbonated soft drink product level data where we observe products store coverage we are able to estimate their logit nested logit and random coe cient logit speci cations of demand in a structural model of equilibrium allowing for store coverage turns out to have a very signi cant impact on the estimated structural parameters and on the predictive power of the model taking these estimated structural parameters we perform a counterfactual whereby stores carry all products in the market we nd systematic increases in price elasticities and welfare in our new equilibrium competition in markets is more curtailed than normally assumed in structural models of industries

output price markups and producer size abstract this paper examines how output prices and markups vary across the size distribution of producers it uses unique plant level data on physical output revenue and input expenditures for six homogeneous u s manufactured products the results reveal that for five of the six products output prices decline systematically with increases in plant size in the most extreme case corrugated boxes the smallest producers have prices that average 20 percent above the mean price while the largest producers average 10 percent below the mean at the other extreme the price dispersion for gasoline is small and unrelated to plant size plant specific markups of price over marginal cost vary across the size distribution of producers for five of the products in three cases they decline in two cases they increase and one product gasoline shows no systematic variation

the dynamic effects of bundling as a product strategy several key questions in bundling have not been empirically examined in marketing is mixed bundling more effective than pure bundling or pure components does correlation in consumer valuations make bundling more or less effective does bundling serve as a complement or substitute to network effects to address these questions we develop a consumer choice model from microfoundations to capture the essentials of our setting the handheld video game market we provide a framework to understand the dynamic long term effects of bundling on demand the primary explanation for the profitability of bundling relies on homogenization of consumer valuations for the bundle allowing the firm to extract more surplus we find that bundling can be effective through a novel and previously unexamined mechanism of dynamic consumer segmentation which operates independent of the homogenization effect and can in fact be stronger when the homogenization effect is weaker we also find that bundles are treated as separate products distinct from component products by consumers sales of both hardware and software components decrease in the absence of bundling and consumers who had previously purchased bundles might delay purchases resulting in lower revenues we also find that mixed bundling dominates pure bundling and pure components in terms of both hardware and software revenues investigating the link between bundling and indirect network effects we find that they act as substitute strategies with a lower relative effectiveness for bundling when network effects are stronger

productivity growth in east asia a reappraisal in recent years there has been considerable disagreement over the extent to which productivity growth has accounted for the success of the east asian economies empirical evidence based on forms of growth accounting or direct estimation of a production function is inconclusive so that the debate appears to be at a stalemate this article applies an alternative approach using the malmquist productivity indices to investigate the contribution of productivity to the longer term growth the results support the view that over the longer term the east asian economies were input driven but interesting differences arise between countries when shorter periods are analysed

estimating most productive scale size using data envelopment analysis abstract the relation between the most productive scale size mpss for paparticular input and output mixes and returns to scale for multiple inputs multiple outputs situations is explicitly developed this relation is then employed to extend the applications of data envelopment analysis dea introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes ccr to the estimation of most productive scale sizes for convex production possibility sets it is then shown that in addition to productive inefficiencies at the actual scale size the ccr efficiency measure also reflects any inefficiencies due to divergence from the most productive scale size two illustrations of the practical applications of these results to the estimation of most productive scale sizes and returns to scale for hospitals and stem electric generation plants are also provided emphasize the advantage of this method in examining specific segments of the efficient production surface

measuring market power in the ready to eat cereal industry the ready to eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration high price cost margins large advertising to sales ratios and numerous introductions of new products previous researchers have concluded that the ready to eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive pricing behavior and intense nonprice competition this paper empirically examines this conclusion in particular i estimate price cost margins but more importantly i am able empirically to separate these margins into three sources i that which is due to product differentiation ii that which is due to multi product firm pricing and iii that due to potential price collusion the results suggest that given the demand for different brands of cereal the first two effects explain most of the observed price cost margins i conclude that prices in the industry are consistent with noncollusive pricing behavior despite the high price cost margins leading firms are able to maintain a portfolio of differentiated products and influence the perceived product quality it is these two factors that lead to high price cost margins

eco efficiency of the western taiwan straits economic zone an evaluation based on a novel eco efficiency model and empirical analysis of influencing factors abstract obtaining the most economic benefits while using the least resources and causing the least environmental damage is an urgent and key problem in achieving sustainable development the concept of eco efficiency provides a comprehensive perspective for observing and solving this problem this paper proposes an extended data envelopment analysis model named the win us sbm as a comprehensive eco efficiency evaluation method that can accommodate undesirable outputs all the identification problems of decision making units dmus possible slacks of variables and the problems of an insufficient number of available dmus and intertemporal comparability china s western taiwan straits economic zone wts economic zone is an important regional economic growth center by applying win us sbm and arcgis software we investigated data on the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics of eco efficiency in the wts economic zone for the years 2009 2016 later the global malmquist luenberger index was used to decompose the sources of growth in eco efficiency finally the main driving factors of eco efficiency were explored through a tobit regression analysis the empirical results show that 1 the overall eco efficiency of the wts economic zone had greatly improved increasing by 11 46 annually and the cumulative growth rate of eco efficiency was 110 84 from 2009 to 2016 2 the eastern area had the highest average eco efficiency followed by the western area and the middle area in that order also the growth rate of the middle area ranked first 16 68 whereas the eastern area had the slowest growth in eco efficiency 7 22 3 on the whole the growth of eco efficiency was driven mainly by technological progress and was restricted by the decrease in management level which implies that policy makers should focus on improving management and technical levels 4 high levels of economic development population density market openness and industrial structure had positive effects on the eco efficiency of the wts economic zone whereas energy intensity and expenditure on science and technology had negative impacts

static efficiency decompositions and capacity utilisation integrating economic and technical capacity notions starting from existing static decompositions of overall economic efficiency on nonparametric production and cost frontiers this article proposes more comprehensive decompositions including several cost based notions of capacity utilization furthermore in case prices are lacking we develop additional decompositions of overall technical efficiency integrating a technical concept of capacity utilization these new efficiency decompositions provide a link between short and long run economic analysis and in empirical work avoid conflating inefficiency and differences in capacity utilization an empirical analysis using a monthly panel of chilean hydro electric power plants illustrates the potential of these decomposition proposals

competition between networks a study of the market for yellow pages this paper estimates the importance of network effects in the market for yellow pages i estimate three simultaneous equations consumer demand for usage of a directory advertiser demand for advertising and a publisher s first order condition derived from profit maximizing behaviour estimation shows that advertisers value consumer usage and that consumers value advertising implying a network effect i find that internalizing network effects would significantly increase surplus as an application i consider whether the market benefits from monopoly which takes advantage of network effects or oligopoly which reduces market power i find that a more competitive market is preferable copyright 2004 wiley blackwell

the decomposition of total factor co2 emission efficiency of 97 contracting countries in paris agreement abstract greenhouse gas reduction requires joint efforts from the global society while improving co2 emission efficiency is a centrally important means to realize emission reduction targets therefore it is of strategic importance to identify main influential factors to co2 emission efficiency of different countries by considering the technology heterogeneity the originality herein lies in that applying the modified decomposition method of metafrontier malmquist luenberger index mml to define the priority of contracting countries in paris agreement to improve emission efficiency in this study 97 contracting countries of paris agreement are divided into 4 groups according to levels of income low income countries lower middle income countries upper middle income countries and high income countries and studied with their input and output data during 1990 2014 as samples the empirical results reveal that the paths for the contracting countries of paris agreement to improve the efficiency are different first lower middle income group can be facilitated through increasing factor input to increase the mml index considering the highest increase in scale efficiency 2 78 second low income group should eliminate the excessive concentration of inputs by enhancing the energy management efficiency third in terms of the significant advancement of high income group s mml index brought by technology advancement and the abnormal drop of brunei darussalam s mml related to technology decay this analysis emphasized that the advancement and innovation of energy technology are the main force for total factor co2 emission efficiency improvement

relationship between spatial agglomeration and hotel prices evidence from business and tourism consumers abstract in this paper we examine the relationship between number of local competitors and both the average and the dispersion of retail prices in urban hotels using a dataset from the metropolitan area of madrid spain by controlling for hotel characteristics and spatial factors we obtained results for each of the days in one week in line with predictions derived from the traditional monopolistic approach empirical results consistently indicate that a greater density of competitors implies a lower average and less dispersion of local prices moreover we found evidence which supports the idea that the effect of local agglomeration on average prices is particularly weaker at weekends this in turn indirectly suggests that within the metropolitan area there is a greater degree of substitution in hotel locations for tourism consumers than for business consumers

efficiency productivity gains and the size of brazilian supermarkets abstract the supermarket sector is an important segment of the brazilian economy in recent years the role of large retailers and market globalization has transformed this sector in one of the most competitive in the country this paper aims to evaluate the technical efficiency and scale of the brazilian supermarket sector through bootstrap data envelopment analysis and to measure changes in productivity from 2005 to 2012 applying the bootstrapped malmquist index a second stage analysis is performed to explain efficiency levels and productivity gains in terms of supermarket chains characteristics we found that the brazilian supermarket chains have low average efficiency levels and in general there was an increase in productivity in the period the consolidations that took place in this sector can be explained in terms of scales of operation small supermarket chains had lower efficiency levels both in 2005 and 2012 but experienced higher levels of productivity growth in the period results of second stage analysis shows that some supermarket chains characteristics are correlated to productivity gains

the generalized malmquist index and capacity utilization change an application to the italian manufacturing 1989 1994 several indices of plant capacity utilization based on the concept of best practice frontier have been proposed in the literature fare et al 1992 de borger and kerstens 1998 this paper suggests an alternative measure of capacity utilization change based on generalized malmquist index proposed by grifell tatje and lovell in 1998 the advantage of this specification is that it allows the measurement of productivity growth ignoring the nature of scale economies afterwards this index is used to measure capacity change of a panel of italian firms over the period 1989 94 using data envelopment analysis and then its abilities of explaining the short run movements of output are assessed

a reconsideration of hedonic price indexes with an application to pc s this paper compares hedonic to matched model indexes matched model indexes are averages of the price changes of goods that remain on sampled stores shelves since goods that disappear tend to have falling market values matched model indexes select from the right tail of price changes the bls can construct hedonic indexes that correct for this selection and are justified by standard arguments in an empirical study of pc s hedonics produce sharp price declines while matched model indexes are near zero also though there are modifications to hedonics that seem desirable they are not those in current use

productivity measurement in radial dea models with a single constant input abstract we consider productivity measurement based on radial dea models with a single constant input we show that in this case the malmquist and the hicks moorsteen productivity indices coincide and are multiplicatively complete the choice of orientation of the malmquist index for the measurement of productivity change does not matter and there is a unique decomposition of productivity change containing two independent sources namely technical efficiency change and technical change technical change decomposes in an infinite number of ways into a radial magnitude effect and an output bias effect we also show that the aggregate productivity index is given by the geometric mean between any two periods of the simple arithmetic averages of the individual contemporaneous and mixed period distance functions

measuring consumerwelfareinthe cpu market anapplication of the pure characteristics demand model in this article i estimate demand for the personal computer central processing unit and measure consumer welfare using the pure characteristics demand model the model is based on a quasilinear utility function with multiplicative random variables and does not have the idiosyncratic logit error term so that consumer welfare directly reflects consumers valuation of product characteristics welfare calculations show that consumer surplus comprises approximately 90 of total social surplus and that large welfare gains have resulted from the introduction of new products

water pollution abatement by chinese industry cost estimates and policy implications using factory level data provided by china s national environmental protection agency and the tianjin environmental protection bureau the authors of this report estimate the costs of water pollution abatement for chinese industry using their econometric results they analyze the cost effectiveness of current pollution control policy in china and make the conclusions that follow 1 for each pollutant marginal abatement costs exhibit great differences by sector scale and degree of abatement 2 the benefits of stricter discharge standards should be weighed carefully against the costs 3 emissions charges as low as 1 per ton would be sufficient to induce 80 percent abatement of suspended solids chemical oxygen demand and biological oxygen demand respectively 4 the current regulatory system provides an economic incentive to abate by charging a levy on pollution that exceeds the standard the results of this analysis suggest however that changing to a full emissions charge system would greatly reduce overall abatement costs the approach the authors recommend for measuring the costs of abatement is to use joint abatement cost functions that relate total costs to treatment volume and the simultaneous effect of reductions in suspended solids chemical oxygen demand biological oxygen demand and other pollutants tests of alternative functional forms suggest that a simple constant elasticity model fits the data as well as a complex translog model does permitting sophisticated policy experiments with relatively simple calculations

total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 1978 this article total factor productivity growth technological progress and technical efficiency change dimensions of productivity change in yugoslavia 1965 78 was reprinted with permission from the december 1982 issue of the economic journal this article proposes a methodology that decomposes total factor productivity change into two distinct elements technological progress and changes in technical efficiency technological progress is defined as the change in the best practice production frontier all other productivity change is attributed to technical efficiency change the article provides a theoretical framework for decomposing total factor productivity growth as well as a specification and estimation of the deterministic frontier production function it employs a programming technique to estimate a flexible functional form of the production frontier the paper then applies this technique to empirical data from yugoslavia of the period from 1965 to 1978 it concludes that for yugoslavia improvements to technical efficiency comprise the dominant contribution to total factor productivity change this agrees with accumulating evidence that in many developing economies productivity gain due to technological mastery of imported technology is substantial

firm growth and productivity growth evidence from a panel var this paper offers new insights into the processes of firm growth by applying a reduced form vector autoregression var model to longitudinal panel data on french manufacturing firms 1996 2004 we observe the co evolution of key variables such as growth of employment sales and gross operating surplus as well as growth of multifactor productivity it seems that employment growth is negatively associated with subsequent growth of productivity this latter result however is sensitive to our choice of productivit indicator i e multifactor productivity or labour productivity

complex innovation policy systems towards an evaluation mix abstract the mix of contemporary innovation policies impacting on a given territory are typically characterised by quite different underlying rationales and instruments complexity is further increased by multi level considerations thus policies with different characteristics and from different administrative levels are continually interacting with one another in complex policy systems these interactions significantly complicate the evaluation of individual policies and raise a series of difficult questions around how their respective evaluation processes should interact to facilitate learning around the performance of policy systems this paper contributes with a simplified definition of an innovation policy system as the conjuncture of policy mix and multi level dimensions from which a series of steps are proposed for arriving at an evaluation mix relevant for the specific characteristics of a given policy space these ideas are explored with respect to the case of the basque country region of spain and signal an agenda for further applied policy research

graph efficiency and productivity measures an application to us agriculture hyperbolic measures of efficiency and productivity change with respect to a graph representation of production technology allow researchers to consider output and input dimensions simultaneously in measuring producer performance hyperbolic efficiency measures have been proposed but empirical implementation has not followed either in efficiency analysis or in productivity analysis the objectives of this paper are to define hyperbolic performance measures on a graph representation of production technology to motivate their use by stating some of their advantages over their radial counterparts and to introduce a direct formulation to calculate them making use of data envelopment analysis techniques the ideas are illustrated by calculating hyperbolic efficiency and malmquist productivity indexes for a us agricultural panel data set

reconceptualising the policy mix for innovation abstract recent years have seen the emergence take up and use of the term policy mix by innovation policy makers and by policy analysts and scholars alike imported from economic policy debates the term implies a focus on the interactions and interdependencies between different policies as they affect the extent to which intended policy outcomes are achieved however the meaning of the term remains ambiguous nonetheless we argue that the emergence of the policy mix concept into common use in the field of innovation policy studies provides us with a window of opportunity to reconsider some basic and often hidden assumptions in order to better deal with a messy and complex multi level multi actor reality we draw upon a range of literatures to re conceptualise the basic building blocks of innovation policy studies in order to arrive at a useful definition of policy mix tensions and interactions of different kinds across a series of dimensions we suggest that this reconceptualisation has important implications for the future scope and focus of prescriptive and analytical innovation policy studies

competitive storage and commodity price dynamics by buying cheap and selling dear risk neutral commodity speculators can smooth commodity prices and induce serial dependence in price even when none would exist under a simple process of supply and demand commodity prices are variable and strongly positively correlated from one year to the next the variability is often explained by supply factors and the autocorrelation by the activities of speculators we show that this explanation is not consistent with the evidence speculation can substantially increase autocorrelation for prices that are weakly autocorrelated in its absence but not to the high levels that are observed in the data

productivity and technical change the case of taiwan this paper analyses productivity growth in 16 of taiwan s manufacturing industries during the period 1978 1992 the non parametric data envelopment analysis approach is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into efficiency change and technical change the latter is further decomposed into an output bias an input bias and a magnitude component in addition the direction of input bias is identified empirical results indicate that the sector s tfp increased at a rate of 2 89 per annum which could be ascribed to a technical progress 2 56 and an efficiency improvement 0 33

estimating the effect of tax reform in differentiated product oligopolistic markets abstract the incidence of taxation has been extensively discussed in the public finance literature but mainly within a competitive market setting or within a homogenous good cournot type oligopoly in a differentiated product oligopoly the effect of taxation can be more complex as the rate of taxation may affect not only the prices but also the profile and quality of products that are sold in the market in this paper we examine the effects of changing tax regimes in a differentiated product oligopoly in order to illustrate our approach we employ data from one such market the automobile market in israel

productivity growth technical progress and efficiency change in industrialized countries this paper analyzes productivity growth in 17 oecd countries over the period 1979 1988 a nonparametric programming method activity analysis is used to compute malmquist productivity indexes these are decomposed into two component measures namely technical change and efficiency change we find that u s productivity growth is slightly higher than average all of which is due to technical change japan s productivity growth is the highest in the sample with almost half due to efficiency change jel c43 d24 in this paper we apply recently developed

constructing regional advantage platform policies based on related variety and differentiated knowledge bases asheim b t boschma r and cooke p constructing regional advantage platform policies based on related variety and differentiated knowledge bases regional studies this paper presents a regional innovation policy model based on the idea of constructing regional advantage this policy model brings together concepts like related variety knowledge bases and policy platforms related variety attaches importance to knowledge spillovers across complementary sectors the paper categorizes knowledge into analytical science based synthetic engineering based and symbolic arts based in nature with different requirements of virtual and real proximity mixes the implications of this are traced for evolving platform policies that facilitate economic development within and between regions in action lines appropriate to incorporate the basic principles behind related variety and differentiated knowledge bases asheim b t boschma r and cooke p