new technology adoption in us telecommunications the role of competitive pressures and firm level inducements in this study we examine the reasons for the differential adoption levels of a new technology that of electronic switching across firms in the us telecommunications industry using theoretical postulates from the market structure inducements approach to firm behavior and the behavioral theory of the firm we propose that the incentives to adopt a new technology are positively related to the competitive pressures faced by a firm in its micro market negatively related to past levels of performance and positively related to slack availability our sample consists of 40 of the largest firms in the industry we use firm level data collected for the years 1973 1978 1981 1984 and 1987 and the results indicate strong support for our proposition our findings show that in general market effects via the mechanism of competitive pressures generated are strong in explaining inter firm variations in levels of technology adoption in the period since moves to deregulate the industry began however the firm level effects are equally strong if not stronger in explaining such variations both in the period leading up to the commencement of deregulatory moves and also immediately thereafter

does lootable wealth breed disorder a political economy of extraction framework this article proposes a political economy of extraction framework that explains political order and state collapse as alternative outcomes in the face of lootable wealth different types of institutions of extraction can be built on lootable resources with divergent effects on political stability if rulers are able to forge institutions of extraction that give them control of revenues generated by lootable resources then these resources can contribute to political order by providing the income with which to govern conversely the breakdown or absence of such institutions increases the risk of civil war by making it easier for rebels to organize the framework is used to explain two puzzling cases that experienced sharply contrasting political trajectories in the face of lootable resources sierra leone and burma a focus on institutions of extraction provides a stronger understanding of the wide range of political outcomes from chaos to dictatorship to democracy in resource rich countries

the utilization of competing technologies within the firm evidence from cardiac procedures this paper examines the role of technological status in determining the rates at which competing techniques are used within a firm consistent with prior studies technological status is measured on the basis of an actor s prior contributions to the body of knowledge concerning a given technique the empirical analysis considers two treatments for coronary artery disease cad each of which is associated with a distinct professional group within a hospital these two groups are often characterized as engaging in a turf war for patients after controlling for several factors that might explain technological choice the clinical severity of patients the relative quality of the two procedures at a given facility firm level financial performance and other firm level characteristics i find that the technological status of the group associated with each technique affects the relative rate at which it is used within a given hospital moreover this effect is strongest for patients at the margin between the two techniques these results suggest that viewing the choice between competing innovations as a single firm level decision may not always capture the true dynamics underlying such a situation

the energy efficiency paradox revisited through a partial observability approach the present paper examines the energy efficiency paradox demonstrated in greek manufacturing firms through a partial observability approach the data set used has resulted from a survey carried out among 161 energy saving technology firm adopters maximum likelihood estimates that arise from an incidental truncation model reveal that the adoption of the energy saving technologies is indeed strongly correlated to the returns of assets that are required in order to undertake the corresponding investments the source of the energy efficiency paradox lies within a wide range of factors policy schemes that aim to increase the adoption rate of energy saving technologies within the field of manufacturing are significantly affected by differences in the size of firms finally mixed policies seem to be more effective than policies that are only capital subsidy or regulation oriented

empirical studies of financial innovation lots of talk little action this paper reviews the extant empirical studies of financial innovation adopting broad criteria we could find only somewhat more than two dozen studies and since some financial innovations are examined by more than one study they cover only seventeen phenomena especially striking is the fact that only two studies offer tests of the broad hypotheses concerning the environmental conditions spurring financial innovation e g regulation taxes unstable macroeconomic conditions and ripe technologies that have been advanced in descriptive articles we offer some tentative conjectures as to why empirical studies of financial innovation are comparatively rare among our suggested culprits is an absence of accessible data we urge financial regulators to undertake more surveys of financial innovation and to make the survey data more available to researchers

the determinants of social conflict in the latin american mining sector new evidence with quantitative data this paper builds on the case study work into conflict between mining firms and nearby communities through a statistical analysis of the determinants of social conflict at the local level in the mining sector in latin america the analysis is based on an original dataset of 640 geo located mining properties at the advanced exploration stage and above which includes gis information on environment and land use patterns around the property sub national socio economic characteristics of the population firm and mining property characteristics as well as information about known social conflicts

shared atm networks and banking competition abstract in this paper we study the incentives of banks to share their automatic teller machines atms when they are competitors in the market for deposits we construct a stylized model of banking competition which emphasises the distinctive features of atm compatibility we find that in equilibrium either a strict subset of banks share their atms or total incompatibility prevails we also derive the implications for atm compatibility of withdrawal fees interchange bank fees entry and depositor switching costs finally we investigate the normative implications of our model and draw some policy conclusions

the effects of expectations on technology adoption some empirical evidence n rosenberg 1976 argues that in many markets prospective buyers for an innovation are strongly influenced by expectations concerning the timing and significance of future improvements the primary objectives of this article are to provide a model of the innovation decision process of user firms that expect improvements in current best technology and to offer an empirical study that tests the model s predictions among other results the author finds empirical support for rosenberg s argument and demonstrates theoretically that compared to models without technological expectations and learning the optimal decision process is nonmonotonic copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

estimating the innovator s dilemma structural analysis of creative destruction in the hard disk drive industry 1981 1998 this paper studies strategic industry dynamics of creative destruction in which firms and technologies experience turnover theories predict that cannibalization between existing and new products delays incumbents innovation whereas preemptive motives accelerate it incumbents cost dis advantage relative to that of entrants would further reinforce these tendencies to empirically assess these three forces i estimate a dynamic oligopoly model using a unique panel data set of hard disk drive manufacturers the results suggest that despite strong preemptive motives and a substantial cost advantage over entrants cannibalization makes incumbents reluctant to innovate which can explain at least 57 percent of the incumbent entrant innovation gap

complementarities in organizational design and the diffusion of information technologies an empirical analysis we use a specially designed survey on french firms located in haute savoie to provide empirical evidence suggesting that information and communication technologies adoption is not only influenced by the traditional factors of technology diffusion but also by complementarity effects between strategies organization and information technologies the data collected permitted several advances firstly we could study authentic ict while the recent literature has mainly focused on computer capital stocks or automation tools secondly we constructed measures of the determinants put forward by the models of technology diffusion thirdly we studied three kinds of practices organizational and strategic practices technological choices

the determinants of technology adoption the case of the banking firm using data on the adoption of automatic teller machines by firms in the banking industry this study examines the relationship between the decision to adopt new technology and its determinants since banking firms differ considerably in terms of the competitive environments in which they operate focusing on this one innovation in this industry allows a stronger test of the relationship between market structure and the adoption of new technology than has been previously conducted using a failure time estimation procedure we find that larger banks and banks operating in more concentrated local banking markets register a higher conditional probability of adopting this new technology all else equal we also find that other results are consistent with the underlying model and that the bank s regulatory environment shapes its adoption decision in plausible ways

on the adoption of new technologies we investigate the incentives of private firms to adopt new technologies econometric investigation is performed on a pooled sample of individual us airline firms over the period 1971 to 1986 for which extensive information on available jet aircraft technology and fleet choice have been recorded given the incidence of successive commercial aircraft innovations and variation in production attributes across firms we are able to consider a wider array of time dependent and time independent adoption influences than in previous firm level studies to the extent that our study provides useful general insights into adoption decisions by firms the results have implications for us global competitiveness policy one key finding is that firms subject to increased product market competition exhibit a higher propensity to adopt technological innovations

how does incompatibility affect prices evidence from atm s if consumers value mix and match combinations of network complements incompatibility between different sellers components should affect prices in atm markets a 1996 governance change exogenously generated such incompatibility by allowing banks to impose surcharges when other banks deposit customers use their atm s in our data incompatibility makes the relationship between deposit account pricing and own atm s more positive and makes the relationship between deposit account pricing and competitors atm s more negative the level effect on prices is positive the pattern of results is more pronounced in high population density markets where customers may care more about atm s

striving to be green the adoption of total quality environmental management many firms are undertaking environment friendly organizational change by applying the philosophy of total quality management with its emphasis on reducing waste and increasing efficiency their objective is to improve their management of pollution and increase customer satisfaction this article investigates the factors that lead to total quality environmental management tqem by large firms we find that internal considerations stemming from a firm s technical capability size absolute and relative to competing firms extent of operations and volume of past emissions are strongly associated with the tqem adoption decision the first four factors are proxies for the firm s costs and capabilities of adopting tqem while the fifth factor is related to the benefits from increasing efficiency and waste reduction and thus proxies for internally generated demand for tqem the desire to improve a firm s image with customers earning good will with regulators and the anticipation of future regulations do not a

exploring links between innovation and diffusion adoption of nox control technologies at us coal fired power plants while many studies have looked at innovation and adoption of technologies separately the two processes are linked advances and expected advances in a single technology should affect both its adoption rate and the adoption of alternative technologies this paper combines plant level data on us coal fired electric power plants with patent data pertaining to nox pollution control techniques to study this link as in other studies of environmental technologies the effect of other explanatory variables is dominated by the effect of environmental regulations demonstrating that the mere presence of environmental technologies is not enough to encourage its usage nonetheless i do find that technological advances are important for the adoption of existing combustion modification technologies however these advances are less important for the adoption of newer post combustion control techniques which are adopted only when needed to comply with the strictest emission limits

a framework for analyzing efficiency risks costs and innovations in the payments system the market for payment instruments such as cash checks and electronic funds transfers is one of the largest most important and economically interesting markets in the economic system virtually every economic transaction requires the use of a payment instrument therefore on a value basis the demand for payment instruments equals the demand for all other goods services assets and other financial instruments traded in the economy combined in a monetary economy the buyers and sellers of any commodity must not only agree on the price and quantity to be exchanged but must also concur on the payment method that will be employed in the exchange that is every commodity buyer takes on the role of a payor and every commodity seller takes on the role of a payee and they jointly demand a payment instrument of equal value to the commodities exchanged the size of payments markets is illustrated in table 1 which shows transactions

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

competition and innovation evidence from financial services abstract this paper presents new evidence on the relationship between competition and innovation by extending previous literature from manufacturing to financial services we introduce a new measure of overall innovation by estimating and enveloping annual minimum cost frontiers to create a global frontier the distance to the global frontier constitutes each bank s technology gap which decreases if the bank manages to innovate our innovation measure enables us to derive and estimate the model of aghion et al 2005b at the firm level for the us banking industry based on individual bank call report data for the period 1984 2004 consistent with theoretical and empirical work by aghion et al we find evidence of an inverted u relationship between competition and innovation that is robust over several different specifications further evidence on major structural changes in the us banking industry indicates that banks moved beyond their optimal innovation level and that interstate banking deregulation resulted in lower bank innovation policy implications to financial reform and prudential regulation are discussed also

the dynamics of technological change in uk retail banking services an evolutionary perspective abstract the purpose of this paper is to elaborate an evolutionary perspective on the process of structural change that has characterized the banking industry in the united kingdom uk for this purpose the evolution of retail financial services is contrasted against the backdrop of the implementation and development of information and communication technologies icts the paper delves into the sources and the effects of technological change in banking over a long term perspective 1840s 1990s to point out the significance of the opportunities and the constraints that have shaped the growth and development of this industry this is interpreted as a three stage evolutionary process driven by intertemporal coordination across several complementary domains including activities of production business organization consumption and the underlying regulatory setting it is concluded that the evolution of uk retail banking displays the characteristics of a distributed process of innovation in which developers of technologies service suppliers and customers contribute to the process of structural change of the industry

the intra firm diffusion of new process technologies the study of intra firm diffusion has largely been neglected and the limited extant literature overwhelmingly relies upon uncertainty reduction via information spreading or epidemic learning as the main driver in this paper an alternative approach is taken whereby the intra firm diffusion of new process technologies reflects the profitability of new technology adoption as proxied by firm characteristics the approach is tested using data relating to the diffusion of computer numerically controlled machine tools within firms in the uk engineering and metalworking sectors the empirical analysis does not reject the hypothesis that profitability considerations are important with a number of firm characteristics being isolated as of special relevance including firm size and the use of complementary technologies and managerial techniques however there is little support for the traditional epidemic effect

complementarity and cumulative learning effects in early diffusion of multiple technologies this paper concentrates on the contextual diffusion of flexible automation production and design engineering technologies in the italian metalworking industry the authors use duration data analysis with explanatory covariates to point out the role of complementarities between the technologies examined and learning by using effects matured with experience of previously available technologies in shaping diffusion paths the impact of industry and plant specific control variables as well as that of the stock of previous adopters on adoption probabilities is also taken into account in addition the authors analyze duration versus calendar time dependence of adoption probabilities copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

savings growth and the resource curse hypothesis an important connection between recent attempts to understand the determinants of economic growth and the measurement of sustainability is the finding of a negative and significant relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth this is the so called resource curse hypothesis using cross country regressions we offer evidence that the curse may itself be a manifestation of the inability of governments to manage large resource revenues sustainably in particular these results offer another perspective on the resource curse hypothesis the countries where growth has lagged are those where the combination of natural resource macroeconomic and public expenditure policies have led to a low rate of genuine saving net saving adjusted for resource depletion

a dynamic analysis of the adoption of a new technology the case of optical scanners two p roportional hazard models are used to investigate the differingeffects of marke t structure variables on the conditional probabilityof a firm initially adoptin g the new technology of optical scanners as the innovation spreads through the f ood store industry during the early stage leading firms with large average sto re size which are not members of chains and which operate in less concentrated m arkets with higher incomes and wage rates tend to adopt scanners sooner later on differences in seller concentration market share and size become less impo rtant as other firms follow prior adoptions copyright 1987 by mit press

adoption of competing inventions by united states steel producers a hstract this research investigates innovative behavior in the u s steel industry under the assumption that basic oxygen and large electric furnaces are competing technologies the empirical model of innovation is based on recent theoretical research the coefficients are estimated by a seemingly unrelated tobit approach the research finds innovation is strongly influenced by a demonstration effect adoption is also influenced by potential cost savings and technical progress there is no evidence that large u s steel producers modernized more slowly than their smaller rivals the large electric furnace becomes sufficiently attractive by 1980 that firms choose not to adopt basic oxygen

institutions and the resource curse countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners we claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down when institutions are grabber friendly while more resources raise income when institutions are producer friendly we test this theory building on sachs and warner s influential works on the resource curse our main hypothesis that institutions are decisive for the resource curse is confirmed our results contrast the claims of sachs and warner that institutions do not play a role

the money doctor in the andes the kemmerer missions 1923 1933 the money doctor in the andes is an account of the technical assistance missions to five andean republics colombia ecuador chile bolivia and peru undertaken by princeton university economist edwin walter kemmerer during the 1920s drake demonstrates that in each case the kemmerer mission recommended an identical series of monetary fiscal and banking reforms adding occasional recommendations on everything from administrative reorganization to penal code reform as local circumstances seemed to warrant in each case too local legislatures adopted all the main kemmerer proposals virtually without debate or modifications drake links the kemmerer missions to vital developments in the political economic history of the andean republics in the interwar period he analyzes the domestic interest groups and political forces whose convergent strategies gave the kemmerer missions their remarkable record in achieving local success for the reforms proposed second drake situates the kemmerer missions at the center of a process of political modernization that created new institutions and policy agencies in each of the five countries the missions thereby contributed to the expansion of the central government as an agent of development in ways that later differed sharply from kemmerer s orthodox policies finally the money doctor in the andes regards developments in the andean countries in the context of the region s developing economic ties to the united states expectations that kemmerer s plans would simultaneously attract foreign capital and control inflation drew support from sectors as diverse as trade unions and landowners when the depression deepened kemmerer s policies proved counterproductive and the fragile consensus that had installed them fell apart but the political and administrative reforms endured with far reaching consequences

technological regimes and innovation in services the case of the italian banking industry abstract in this paper we propose a conceptual model to analyse innovations originating from the diffusion of information technologies in the banking sector we argue that technical change in this industry exhibits a revolutionary character a distinction is made between the mass automation regime focusing mainly on the mechanization of back office procedures in the 1960s and 1970s and the smart automation regime originating from the introduction of distributed data processing and network technologies and centered around the supply of electronic banking services a theoretical model is developed which emphasizes the crucial role played by demand pull variables in stimulating innovative behaviour under the smart automation regime in contrast limited importance is attributed to cumulative and learning by doing effects relating to back office automation at least for banks endowed with sufficient absorptive capacity the theoretical hypotheses are tested through an econometric analysis of the determinants of the innovative behaviour in electronic payment systems of a sample of italian commercial banks

rival precedence and the dynamics of technology adoption an empirical analysis this study employs information on the adoption of automatic teller machines by banking firms to examine the nature of firm reactions to rival precedence in the adoption process using a failure time estimation procedure it is found that the ado ption of this innovation by rivals increases the conditional probabil ity that a decision to adopt will be made the effect of spillovers f rom technology adoption and the interaction of market concentration a nd rival precedence are also investigated finally the study shows w ith an example how the estimation procedure may be used to test the u nderpinnings of diffusion processes copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited

introduction epistemic communities and international policy coordination the growing technical uncertainties and complexities of problems of global concern have made international policy coordination not only increasingly necessary but also increasingly difficult if decision makers are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of a specific problem how do they define state interests and develop viable solutions what factors shape their behavior under conditions of uncertainty what are the origins of international institutions and how can we best study the processes through which international policy coordination and order emerge while a variety of analytic approaches have been used to address the problems of international cooperation the approaches have yielded only fragmentary insights at its core the study of policy coordination among states involves arguments about determinism versus free will and about the ways in which the international system is maintained and transformed among the overlapping topics of debate are whether national behavior is determined or broadly conditioned by system level factors unit level factors or some complex interplay between the two whether state policymakers can identify national interests and behave independently of pressures from the social groups they nominally represent and whether states respond consistently to opportunities to create defend or expand their own wealth and power to enhance collective material benefits or to promote nonmaterial values a related question of

international comparison of bank production characteristics and technological change in this paper we conduct an international comparison of bank production and technological characteristics the comparison is performed using novel evidence on changes in labour demand over the period 1980 89 for banks headquartered in canada france west germany italy japan and the united states the results suggest that there is relatively low substitutability of labour for capital in the production process of these banking organizations significant scale economies were found with regards to the expansion of output and the concomitant increase in labour in addition technological change operated to lower the quantity of inputs needed to produce a given level of outputs and increased the minimum efficient size bank over the sample period many of the production characteristics and technology effects varied significantly across countries these findings imply that intercountry differences in production characteristics and technological change should be explicitly recognized in bank strategic planning

time to change what to sow risk preferences and technology adoption decisions of cotton farmers in china this paper examines the role of individual risk attitudes in the decision to adopt a new form of agricultural biotechnology in china i conducted a survey and a field experiment to elicit the risk preferences of chinese farmers who faced the decision of whether to adopt genetically modified bt cotton a decade ago in my analysis i expand the measurement of risk preferences beyond expected utility theory to incorporate prospect theory i find that farmers who are more risk averse or more loss averse adopt bt cotton later farmers who overweight small probabilities adopt bt cotton earlier

shining a light on the resource curse an empirical analysis of the relationship between natural resources transparency and economic growth summary one of the most common policy prescriptions for overcoming the so called resource curse particularly for extractive industries has been to call for greater transparency and accountability from governments however despite the conceptual attraction of this policy it has never been empirically proven that resource rich countries are actually less transparent than other countries and whether this lack of transparency has had a significant negative effect on economic growth using a relatively new index of transparency that has extensive coverage both across countries and time the results suggest a strong and robust negative causal association running from point resource export revenues to transparency furthermore there is also some evidence that this lack of transparency is associated with a subsequent decrease in economic growth

the diffusion of new technology and the market for an innovation this article shows that the diffusion of a capital embodied process innovation results from a pattern of decreasing incremental benefits and adoption costs for later adoptions strategic behavior is inessential to this finding we develop a method for comparing diffusion rates for different market structures in the capital equipment market we consider cases with market power on the seller s side of the market and on the buyers side of the market a case with no market power and the welfare optimal case we find that a joint venture adopts an innovation more slowly than other market regimes to protect existing capital investments and that the adoption rate is slower than is socially optimal a monopoly supplier on the other hand adopts at a rate faster than is socially optimal this result is usually also the case when there is no market power finally we show that the monopoly supplier accelerates adoptions faster than in the case where there is no market power but retards later adoptions market power thus makes a difference in diffusion rates and on which side of the market that power lies makes a considerable difference

models of technology diffusion abstract the literature on new technology diffusion is vast and it spills over many conventional disciplinary boundaries this paper surveys the literature by focusing on alternative explanations of the dominant stylized fact that the usage of new technologies over time typically follows an s curve the most commonly found model which is used to account for this model is the so called epidemic model which builds on the premise that what limits the speed of usage is the lack of information available about the new technology how to use it and what it does the leading alternate model is often called the probit model which follows from the premise that different firms with different goals and abilities are likely to want to adopt the new technology at different times in this model diffusion occurs as firms of different types gradually adopt it there are actually many ways to generate an s curve and the third class of models which we examine are models of density dependence popularized by population ecologists in these models the twin forces of legitimation and competition help to establish new technologies and then ultimately limit their take up finally we look at models in which the initial choice between different variants of the new technology affect the subsequent diffusion speed of the chosen technology such models often rely on information cascades which drive herd like adoption behaviour when a particular variant is finally selected

how do mineral states learn path dependence networks and policy change in the development of economic institutions summary based on case study methods i draw lessons from the political economy of macroeconomic management in chile and peru to explain how mineral states learn to think long term and eventually escape the resource curse i give an institutionalist account of the rise of countercyclical funds showing how the long term development of elite networks qualifies the contemporary making of curse escapes policy networks compose one central avenue of institutional development for both the reproduction of path dependence and the making of institutional change the exposition challenges political economy of development frameworks which over emphasize structural initial conditions and assume steady rent seeking behavior of state agents

the social costs of unit banking restrictions abstract many u s commercial banks are prohibited from establishing more than one full service office location in the absence of free entry to the banking industry this constraint may force unit banks to operate with a socially inefficient combination of inputs moreover entry to the industry in unit banking states may be more difficult than in branching states where market entrants need not necessarily acquire a new charter if so existing unit banks could price their output above marginal social cost earning excess profits and imposing allocational inefficiencies this paper demonstrates empirically that unit banking restrictions in the united states impose statistically and economically significant deadweight social costs

innovation in academe the diffusion of information technologies this study investigates the diffusion of two early information technologies across 1348 institutions of higher education 1 the adoption of because it s time network bitnet a precursor to the internet as we know it today and 2 the adoption of the domain name system dns with its registration of domain names an essential feature of the modern internet we find that the time paths of adoption for both generally exhibit the typical s shape found for other innovations we identify factors likely responsible for the patterns observed and in the process extend the scope of the diffusion literature by incorporating insights from the optimization behaviour of nonprofits using a proportional hazards framework we find that faster adoption occurred among institutions focused on research and doctoral education as well as among select liberal arts colleges relative to nonselect colleges faster adoption also occurred for larger institutions suggesting that they benefited from economies of scale adoption w

trade technology and the environment does access to technology promote environmental regulation abstract focusing specifically on regulation of coal fired power plants we examine how technological innovation by early adopters influences the timing of new environmental regulation in non innovating countries we build a general equilibrium model of an open economy to identify the political economy determinants of regulation with a newly created dataset of so 2 and no x regulations for coal fired power plants and a patent based measure of the technology frontier we estimate the determinants of environmental regulation diffusion our findings support the hypothesis that international economic integration eases access to environmentally friendly technologies and leads to earlier adoption ceteris paribus of regulation in non innovating countries however we also find evidence that domestic trade protection promotes earlier adoption allowing shifts of regulatory costs to domestic consumers furthermore international market power permits large countries to shift costs to foreign consumers other political economy factors such as the quality of domestic coal are also important determinants

intrafirm diffusion of new technologies an empirical application research on the diffusion of new technologies has centred on the study of the interfirm rate of diffusion paying much less attention to intrafirm aspects this paper attempts to overcome this gap in the literature by analysing the factors that influence the speed with which a new technology the atm is fully adopted the data over which the hypotheses are tested belongs to the spanish savings banks market the results show that the rate of intrafirm diffusion is explained by innovation firm and market characteristics in testing our hypotheses we make use of both traditional methods and survival analysis techniques

political foundations of the resource curse in this paper we argue that the political incentives that resource endowments generate are the key to understanding whether or not they are a curse we show 1 politicians tend to over extract natural resources relative to the efficient extraction path because they discount the future too much and 2 resource booms improve the efficiency of the extraction path however 3 resource booms by raising the value of being in power and by providing politicians with more resources which they can use to influence the outcome of elections increase resource misallocation in the rest of the economy 4 the overall impact of resource booms on the economy depends critically on institutions since these determine the extent to which political incentives map into policy outcomes countries with institutions that promote accountability and state competence will tend to benefit from resource booms since these institutions ameliorate the perverse political incentives that such booms create countries without such institutions however may suffer from a resource curse

timing of technology adoption and product market competition abstract this paper examines how product market competition affects firms timing of adopting a new technology as well as whether the market provides sufficient adoption incentives it demonstrates that adoption dates differ not only among symmetric firms but also among markets with different market features more specifically technology adoption can occur earlier in a market with cournot competition than in a market with bertrand competition it can also occur earlier in a market in which goods are not too close substitutes therefore this paper shows that competition toughness does not always reinforce adoption incentives when goods are sufficiently differentiated adoption occurs later than is socially optimal

e business usage across and within firms in the uk profitability externalities and policy using data from the third uk community innovation survey we model the usage of e business across and within firms in the uk in the year 2000 as a single observation upon an integrated process of inter and intra firm diffusion the intra firm dimension is a significant extension to standard analysis the model estimates indicate that the pattern of e business usage reflects the heterogeneity of firms in terms of size other innovative activity and labour force skills generating differences in the payoffs to use as well as market and non market intermediated externalities the policy implications of the findings are discussed c 2008 elsevier b v all rights reserved

technological diffusion in primary health care the paper contains a theoretical and empirical analysis of the driving forces behind the diffusion of dry chemical laboratory equipment in norwegian primary health care the empirical analysis is embedded in a theoretical model of a dynamic investment problem focusing on heterogeneity in the potential adopters profit functions the empirical analysis indicates that most adopters are too late in adopting the new technology a logit analysis of the diffusion process lends some support to the notion that profit function heterogeneity influences the diffusion process an offspin of the empirical analysis is information on the reimbursement system indicating that this system does not promote efficient resource allocation in the sector

cursing the blessings natural resource abundance institutions and economic growth summary since sachs and warner s sachs j d warner a m 1995a natural resource abundance and economic growth nber working paper no 5398 contribution there has been a lively debate on the so called natural resource curse this paper re examines the effects of natural resource abundance on economic growth using new measures of resource endowment and considering the role of institutional quality we find a positive direct empirical relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth in both ols and 2sls regressions the positive resource effects are particularly strong for subsoil wealth our results also show no evidence of negative indirect effects of natural resources through the institutional channel

the reaper and the scanner indivisibility led incremental innovations and the adoption of new technologies widespread adoption of a new capital embodied technology requires a continu ous flow of incremental innovations a few of them address the key problem of indivisibility by making renting the new machine a viable alternative to buying it or by dividing it up into modular elements such incremental innovations differ from the learning by doing effects usually considered by diffusion models and greatly affect the structure of the adopting industry the case for keeping them in due account is made by revisiting paul david s classic paper on the mccormick reaper by criticising the subsequent evolution of threshold models of adoption and by summarising my own findings on the diffusion of electronic pre press devices

the growth effects of tax rates in the oecd this paper explores the merits of macro and micro based tax rate measures within an open economy fiscal policy and growth model using annual data for 15 oecd countries we find statistically small non robust long run growth effects of macro based average tax rates on capital income and consumption but some evidence for average labor income tax effects changes in micro marginal income tax rates at both the personal and corporate levels yield statistically robust gdp responses of modest size both domestic and foreign corporate taxes appear relevant in general tax effects on gdp operate largely via factor productivity rather than factor accumulation