lorenz domination and global tax progressivity a reply the concept of tax progressivity at a point local progressivity is well defined and accepted but the concept of overall progressivity of a tax schedule global progressivity is not as precise and clearly defined even though it is an important concept and is widely used in evaluating the redistributive impact of tax policies public finance economists have been comparing tax schedules and making statements on one as more progressive than another without being very precise about the basis of comparison in my earlier paper in the may 1985 issue of this journal liu 1985 i attempted to unify the two concepts of local and global progressivity two requirements are imposed when a tax schedule is characterized as globally progressive one of which is structural and the other redistributive and hence normative in nature drawing on the earlier work of jakobsson 1976 musgrave thin s measure was shown to satisfy both requirements two recently proposed measures by suits 1977 and kakwani 1976 were shown to be unappealing from both a positive and a normative viewpoint in their comment on my paper formby smith and sykes pointed out an error in a proposition by jakobsson thereby showing that the link between the pointwise concept of residual progression and the global concept of lorenz domination is weaker than indicated by jakobsson and me this reduces the appeal of musgrave thin s global measure as structurally consistent with pointwise progressivity everywhere in the tax schedule the implication is that if we insist on this structural consistency the basis for comparison of tax schedules will be too restrictive since comparison will require one post tax income distribution to lorenz dominate another for all instead of for any pre tax income distributions hence despite my earlier effort the device of a global measure of tax progressivity that is consistent with pointwise

international technology licensing monopoly rents transaction costs and exclusive rights as firms increasingly use licensing to exploit knowledge based assets in global technology markets appropriate structuring of these agreements has become an important line of research inquiry one area that has received less attention is the nature of rights granted in inter firm licensing relationships although it is an important clause that has implications for profit generation from licensing of proprietary assets conceptualizing licensing rights in terms of number of licenses granted and exclusivity rights given to a licensee in a foreign market this paper examines the determinants of these rights based on monopoly rents and transaction costs associated with different types of licensing contracts hypotheses are empirically tested through two studies one based on large us manufacturing firms and the other on a cross national sample of medium sized firms actively involved in international technology licensing results from both studies show a greater propensity to use non exclusive multiple licensing when the licensed technology has greater potential to produce differentiated products or when there is greater threat of substitutive technologies entering the market on the other hand innovative technologies and a higher degree of asset specific investments required of the licensee for the technology are related to the use of single exclusive licensing agreements

unemployment and inflation consequences of unexpected election results the empirical evidence toward rational partisan theory of business cycles is mixed and thus inconclusive this is due to the enormous heterogeneity of the existing empirical studies only a few of these test explicitly for the central theoretical innovation that post electoral blips in economic activity depend on the degree of the electoral surprise using polling data we present empirical evidence in favor of rational partisan theory for a panel of oecd countries

disruption costs learning by doing and technology adoption abstract we study technology adoption in a dynamic model of price competition adoption involves disruption costs and learning by doing because of disruption costs the adopting firm begins in a market disadvantage which may persist if its rival captures the customers that the adopting firm needs to learn the technology the prospect of future rents by the rival results in i a failure to adopt socially efficient technologies ii an equilibrium preference for technologies that are learned faster but have lower social value and iii more technologies being adopted if more firms enter the market

entry and competitive dynamics in the mobile telecommunications market abstract we propose an extension of the gans stern gans j s stern s 2003 the product market and the market for ideas commercialization strategies for technology entrepreneurs research policy 32 2 333 350 framework that includes entry by existing firms an incumbent firm possessing complementary assets and strong appropriability is in a formidable position teece d j 1986 profiting from technological innovation implications for integration collaboration licensing and public policy research policy 15 6 285 305 however a de alio entrant can leverage complementary assets to enter along a new technological trajectory and then develop appropriability we illustrate how several mobile telecommunications firms ericsson nokia and samsung pursued this strategy to catch up with the market leader motorola we also identify several shortcomings in motorola s approach it was too inward looking in developing technologies but ironically not inward looking enough in exploiting its most valuable patents

when do auctions ensure the welfare maximizing allocation of scarce inputs we determine when an unfettered auction will ensure the welfare maximizing allocation of a scarce input that enhances product quality and may reduce production costs a supplier values the input for this use value and for its foreclosure value because once the input is acquired it is unavailable to rivals an unfettered auction often ensures the welfare maximizing allocation of an input increment however it can fail to do so when the input would increase relatively rapidly the competitive position of a rival with a moderate competitive disadvantage bidder handicapping that ensures auctions generate welfare maximizing input allocations differ from standard handicapping policies

single crossing conditions in comparisons of tax progressivity statements to the effect that one tax is more progressive than another are frequently made but seldom explained starting from a criterion of lorenz domination this paper shows how an intuitively appealing single crossing condition on appropriately normalized tax schedules may be used in progressivity comparisons this condition is closely related to and illuminates the necessary and sufficient condition derived by jakobsson 1976 for the distributional implications of alternative taxes to be inferred from their schedules alone

when do stronger patents increase continual innovation under continual innovation greater patent strength expands innovating firms profit against imitation but also shifts profit from current to past innovators we show how the impact of patents on innovation as determined by these two opposing effects varies with industry characteristics when the discount factor is sufficiently high the negative profit division effect is negligible and innovation monotonically increases in patent strength otherwise innovation has an inverted u relationship with patent strength and stronger patents are more likely to increase innovation when the discount factor or the fixed innovation cost is higher we also show how the impact of patents on innovation may change with firms innovation capability and with the intensity of competition from imitators

income redistribution and local tax progressivity a reconsideration this paper investigates and clarifies the relation between global tax progressivity as measured by musgrave and thin s effective progression and pointwise local progression as measured by the elasticity of after tax income with respect to pre tax income residual progression liu s 1985 vigorous defence of the global measure of effective progression is shown to rest upon an erroneous proposition of jakobsson 1976 a counter example is presented demonstrating that the link between residual progression and lorenz domination is much weaker than the work of liu and jakobsson suggests redistribution des revenus et mesure ponctuelle de la progressivite de l imp6t un re examen ce memoire examine et clarifie les rapports entre la progressivite globale de l impot telle que mesuree par l indice de progression effective de musgrave et thin et la progressivite ponctuelle de l imp6t telle que mesuree par l elasticite du revenu apres impot par rapport au revenu avant impot la progression residuelle on montre que la vigoureuse defense de liu 1985 de la mesure globale de progression effective est batie sur une proposition erronnee de jakobsson 1976 un exemple montre bien que le lien entre la progression residuelle et la domination au sens de lorenz est bien plus faible que ne le suggerent les travaux de liu et jakobsson

choosing the competition and patent licensing this article examines licensing as a means of choosing the competitors which a patentee monopolist will face in the period after the patent expires the queue of entrants consists of two firms which differ in their relative strengths as competitors for example by size or level of marginal cost by structuring the industry to be composed of weak competitors the incumbent is able to prolong its dominant position in the industry after the patent expires examples are presented in which the evidence suggests that choosing the competition was an important motivation of the licensor s behavior

innovation and the persistence of monopoly abstract the auction framework enables us to highlight a crucial feature of many r d races the losing firm can recoup part but not the entirety of its r d investments this feature is shown to account for the marked differences in results obtained by gilbert and newbery and by reinganum when the firm investing the largest amount wins with certainty we establish the existence of a unique equilibrium neither firm employs a pure strategy and the incumbent wins more often than the challenger

dynamic inducements in r d investment market signals and network locations this research shows that alliance networks shape how firms respond to uncertainty reducing information generated outside a network product awards signal the potential commercial success of the awa

timing is all elections and the duration of united states business cycles this paper presents a new method for empirically testing predictions of various political business cycle theories by using duration analysis the authors estimate the effect of presidential elections and their outcomes on the likelihood of the occurrence of business cycle turning points in the united states for the period from 1855 to the present as well as for subperiods representing the post world war i and post world war ii eras they find significant evidence that political events increase the likelihood of the end of both expansions and contractions holding constant the effect of duration dependence copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

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

invention and innovation under alternative market structures the case of natural resources this paper examines the interactions between market structure and resource allocation over time when there is endogenous technical progress the structures considered are a planned economy pure monopoly and competition with patent rights in an efficient allocation the date of invention coincides with the date of innovation the date at which technology is used this is also true with a pure monopoly but monopoly retards technical progress relative to the efficient level competition for patents rights to a new technology results in excessively rapid technical progress if the resource endowment of the economy is sufficiently large also competition may lead to sleeping patents where invention strictly precedes the date of innovation

price cap regulation and technical change abstract existing analyses of the implications of price cap regulation for the development of cost reducing technologies assume that all r d is done by the regulated industry this is unrealistic we present a simple model of non cooperative r d by a regulated firm and a single external developer under a price cap regime of the sort characterised by cabral and riordan in equilibrium the external developer exerts less r d than is socially optimal the regulated firm may exert more or less a tightening of the regulatory regime impacts the r d incentives of both players though in different ways the optimal regulatory adjustment parameter may be bigger or smaller than that suggested by existing studies despite the scope for duplication of results research by an outsider necessarily enhances welfare

strategic behaviour of incumbent firms in the uk abstract the main purpose of this paper is to examine the incidence of strategic behaviour in the uk by means of a questionnaire study performed across three broad manufacturing industries food electrical engineering and chemicals of the strategies which have received substantial theoretical attention r d and advertising appear widely used patenting pricing and excess capacity much less so vertical instruments such as purchasing policy also stand out as important but possibly only a minority of firms in our sample actively pursue strategic instruments

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

personal income tax progressivity and output volatility evidence from oecd countries this paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of oecd countries over the period 1982 2009 our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker we find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher personal income tax progressivity leads to lower output volatility this effect comes in addition to the stabilizing impact of government size and it is equally important in economic terms all other factors constant countries with more progressive personal income tax systems seem to benefit from stronger automatic stabilizers

production experiences and market structure in r d competition abstract in the rd and ii the likelihood of persistent leadership increases with the value of being the winner and the value of being a loser but decreases with expected waiting time of r d innovation and the flow of monopoly profits however destructive innovations may still occur even when production experiences are allowed to play an important role in the r d competition

second mover advantages in the strategic adoption of new technology under uncertainty abstract this paper introduces technological uncertainty into a timing game of new technology adoption it is shown that the timing neither necessarily involves first mover advantages in precommitment equilibria reinganum review of economic studies xlviii 1981 395 405 nor rent equalization due to the threat of preemption fudenberg and tirole review of economic studies lii 1985 383 401 rather there may be second mover advantages because of informational spillovers furthermore the model predicts that the equilibrium payoffs will typically be discontinuous and non monotonic in the probability that the new technology is profitable a welfare analysis reveals several market failures and suggests that policy intervention should adequately depend on the nature of uncertainty and the rate of technological progress

monopoly incentives for cost reducing r d abstract it is shown in this paper that there exist cost innovations for which a monopolist has a higher incentive to invest than a social planner this unveils the limits of the claim based on arrow 1959 that a monopoly always has a lower incentive to innovate than a social planner and therefore than is socially desirable in contrast to previous results the comparison of incentives may also depend upon the demand function finally for a restricted domain of analysis a rule for comparing the monopoly and the social planner incentives is derived

and the winner is acquired entrepreneurship as a contest yielding radical innovations new entrants to a market tend to be superior to incumbents in originating radical innovations we provide a new explanation for this phenomenon based on markets for technology it applies in industries where successful entrepreneurial firms or their technologies are acquired by incumbents that then commercialize the innovation to this end we analyze an innovation game between one incumbent and a large number of entrants in the first stage firms compete to develop innovations of high quality they do so by choosing at equal cost the success probability of their rd the bigger the number of entrants the more radical the most radical project generally entrants tend to choose more radical r d approaches and generate the highest value innovation in case of success we illustrate our theoretical findings by a qualitative empirical study of the electronic design automation industry and derive implications for research and management

opportunistic political cycles test in a young democracy setting this paper tests the theory of opportunistic cycles in a decade old democracy russia finds strong evidence of cycles and provides an explanation for why previous literature often found weaker evidence using regional monthly panel data we find that 1 the budget cycle is sizable and short lived public spending shifts toward direct monetary transfers to voters 2 the magnitude of the cycle decreases with democracy government transparency media freedom voter awareness and over time and 3 preelectoral manipulation increases incumbents chances for reelection the short length of the cycle explains underestimation of its size by previous literature because of low frequency data used in previous studies

analyzing literature based innovation output indicators the italian experience abstract this paper presents the results of a study on the product innovations introduced in the italian market in 1989 and reported in a selected number of trade journals the analysis of data collected by means of this literature based counting procedure confirms that r d oriented industries and large firms do not in italy have a marked competitive advantage in innovation the country appears to be instead characterized by a significant presence of consumer goods industries and small firms in innovation our data indicate a statistically significant association between trade competitiveness and strength in product innovation and show the comparatively higher capacity for product innovation of some of the industries in which italy achieves a positive performance in international trade moreover the presence of spillovers at the regional level from both private and public r d expenditures proves to be positively correlated with the development of product innovations finally small firms with fewer than 50 employees appear to be more innovative than is usually believed to be the case

licensees as entry barriers in a more general setting than has been considered hitherto this paper examines how the incumbent in a market threatened by entry can exploit its first mover advantage by licensing its technology not to a potential entrant but to firms that would have remained outside the industry it is shown among other things that the incumbent may subsidize the variable costs of its licensees in order to deter entry even when entry is not deterred it is demonstrated that the incumbent might opt to invite outsiders as licensees

intellectual property rights and the mode of technology transfer abstract transferring technology in an environment where patent protection is uncertain can pose significant risks to an innovating firm s ability to appropriate rents this paper incorporates asymmetric information in a screening game where the innovating firm has the choices of licensing a new product at arm s length to a foreign firm exporting it or licensing it to a subsidiary subsidiary production avoids the risk of imitation but involves higher costs for the innovating firm the gains to the southern country from the lack of intellectual property right protection may be offset by strategic behavior by northern firms who opt for technology transfer via subsidiary or monopoly production