the effects of environmental regulation on technology diffusion the case of chlorine manufacturing we use a hazard model to estimate the effect of environmental regulation on the diffusion of membrane cell production technology in the chlorine manufacturing industry we estimate the effect of regulation on both the adoption of the membrane technology at existing plants and on the exit of existing plants using older technologies we find that environmental regulation did affect the diffusion of the cleaner technology in the chlorine industry however it did so not by encouraging the adoption of membrane cells by existing facilities but by reducing the demand for chlorine and hence encouraging the shutdown of facilities using the environmentally inferior options this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

entrepreneurship financiership and selection we develop an equilibrium model of the market for entrepreneurial finance in which all agents have some personal wealth and a project whose quality is their private information all agents choose whether to invest either as entrepreneurs or financiers or to invest in storage technology we find that a binding economy level wealth constraint which renders credit scarce can create advantageous selection where productive agents become entrepreneurs and unproductive agents become their financiers if funding is easier to obtain entrepreneurship also attracts unproductive agents in our model individual wealth and entrepreneurship are positively negatively correlated if financial market participation is complete incomplete

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

a model of collateral investment and adverse selection this paper characterizes the relationship between entrepreneurial wealth and aggregate investment under adverse selection its main finding is that such a relationship need not be monotonic in particular three results emerge from the analysis i pooling equilibria in which investment is independent of entrepreneurial wealth are more likely to arise when entrepreneurial wealth is relatively low ii separating equilibria in which investment is increasing in entrepreneurial wealth are most likely to arise when entrepreneurial wealth is relatively high and iii for a given interest rate an increase in entrepreneurial wealth may generate a discontinuous fall in investment

cereal technology interventions for the west african semi arid tropics abstract one of the regions of most concern in sub saharan africa is the geographical area of the west african semi arid tropics wasat where there has been little impact from the green revolution and most of the region suffers from inadequate and irregular rainfall and low fertility soils decreasing per capita food production trends and 2 3 per year population growth trends have convinced some to adopt a malthusian perspective about the future of the wasat this paper evaluates the prospects of agricultural technologies and farm management practices that are currently proposed for the wasat cereal farming system the technologies are assessed with respect to their agronomic and economic feasibility risk and their fit within the farming systems they are ranked as to their feasibility of adoption by farmers in the short intermediate and long run the findings suggest that several agricultural technologies are feasible for use in the short run provided that they are used as a package the complexity and initial high financial and human capital requirements however often prohibit farmers from adopting the total package simultaneously a stepwise approach to adoption is difficult since separate adoption results in lower profitability and higher risk levels government policy intervention may be necessary to enable farmers to adopt single technologies en route to total package adoption

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

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

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

rank stock order and epidemic effects in the diffusion of new process technologies an empirical model in this article we construct a general duration model of technology adoption that incorporates the main factors discussed in different theories of diffusion of new process technologies the model is applied to data on diffusion of cnc in the uk engineering industry although we find strong evidence in support of rank and endogenous learning effects there seems to be little evidence in support of the stock and order effects the main factors affecting the diffusion of cnc are found to be endogenous learning firm size industry growth rates the cost of the technology and expected changes in the cost of the technology

non obviousness and screening the paper offers a novel justification for the non obviousness patentability requirement an innovation involves two stages research results in a technology blueprint which development transforms into a profitable activity an innovator who is either efficient or inefficient must rely on outside finance for the development only patented technologies are developed strengthening the non obviousness requirement alleviates adverse selection by discouraging inefficient innovators from doing research but creates inefficiencies by excluding marginal innovations we show that it is socially optimal to raise the non obviousness requirement so as to exclude bad innovators we also provide several robustness checks and discuss the policy implications

technology choice for reducing nox emissions an empirical study of chinese power plants abstract this study investigates the choices of denitration technology in the chinese thermal power sector using a multinomial logit model of the choices among 1135 boilers in thermal power plants operating in china in 2013 we analyze how the choices were influenced by government policies the stringency of national standards and subsidies for using specific technology the results are as follows first china s 12th five year plan might make it more attractive for plants to choose the cheapest denitration technology among the three options examined in this study second technology choices differed significantly by region before the 12th five year plan period these differences have disappeared perhaps due to the economic development across all regions of china third electricity price subsidies offered to plants that use denitration equipment might affect their technology choice these results suggests that plants might choose the cheapest technology available in order to lower investment costs

what do economists tell us about venture capital contracts venture capital markets are characterized by multiple incentive problems and asymmetric information in an uncertain environment all kinds of agency problems are present moral hazard adverse selection hold up problems window dressing etc entrepreneurs and venture capitalists enter into contracts that influence their behavior and mitigate the agency costs in particular they select an appropriate kind and structure of financing and specify the rights as well as the duties of both parties the typical features of venture capital investments are an intensive screening and evaluation process an active involvement of venture capitalists in their portfolio companies a staging of capital infusions the use of special financing instruments such as convertible debt or convertible preferred stock syndication among venture capitalists or a short investment horizon

patent law and complementary innovations this paper explores which patent policy should be applied to complementary innovations that are aggregated into broader technologies i compare a setting in which complementary innovations must be bundled prior to patenting with a second setting in which they can be patented separately the first setting can improve static efficiency by avoiding the costs resulting from the scattering of complementary patents but it also limits the disclosure of small innovations which may lead to inefficient r d cost duplications a model capturing these effects shows that patenting complementary innovations separately is not efficient when innovations can be developed rapidly this result justifies the enforcement of a severe inventive step or non obviousness requirement in sectors where complementary innovations are frequent

does the porter hypothesis explain expected future financial performance the effect of clean water regulation on chemical manufacturing firms previous research provides opposing theoretical arguments regarding the effect of environmental regulation on financial performance as one important argument the porter hypothesis claims that tighter regulation improves financial performance this study provides empirical evidence on this debated effect in particular we employ panel data analysis to examine the effect of clean water act regulation as measured by permitted wastewater discharge limits on expected future financial performance as measured by tobin s q for publicly owned firms in the chemical manufacturing industries we find that tighter permitted discharge limits lower tobin s q i e more stringent clean water act regulation undermines expected future financial performance by decomposing tobin s q into its constituent components market value and replacement costs and estimating each component separately we find that tighter permitted discharge limits lower both components with a larger impact on market value which implies that investors revise their expectations of the discounted present value of future profits in response to changes in clean water act regulation

too much investment a problem of asymmetric information this paper shows that under plausible assumptions the inability of lenders to discover all of the relevant characteristics of borrowers results in investment in excess of the socially efficient level raising the rate of interest above the free market level will restore optimality this conflicts with generally held views and is contrasted with the stiglitz weiss model it is shown that the assumptions which yield overinvestment support debt as the equilibrium method of finance however under the stiglitz weiss assumptions used to derive an underinvestment result equity is shown to be the equilibrium method of finance

zeros and lumps in investment empirical evidence on irreversibilities and nonconvexities the objective of this paper is to investigate if and how capital adjustment departs from the smooth pattern implied by standard model based on convex adjustment costs using norwegian micro data we start by documenting the intermittent and lumpy nature of investment rates we then present two pieces of econometric evidence on these issues first we estimate a discrete hazard model to determine the probability of having an episode of high investment conditional on the length of the interval from the last high investment episode second we estimate a switching regression model that allows for the response of the investment rate to fundamentals to differ across regimes in both cases we investigate the aggregate implications of our results

machine replacement and the business cycle lumps and bumps this paper explores investment fluctuations due to discrete changes in a plant s capital stock the resulting aggregate investment dynamics are surprisingly rich reflecting the interaction between a replacement cycle the cross sectional distribution of the age of the capital stock and an aggregate shock using plant level data lumpy investment is procyclical and more likely for older capital further the predicted path of aggregate investment that neglects vintage effects tracks actual aggregate investment reasonably well however ignoring fluctuations in the cross sectional distribution of investment vintages can yield predictable nontrivial errors in forecasting changes in aggregate investment

effects of heterogeneous technological progress on haze pollution evidence from china abstract technological progress plays an important role in combating haze pollution in the long run however existing studies often ignore the inconsistent effects on the reduction of haze brought by different types of technological progress considering the potential heterogeneity among technological progress this paper constructs a theoretical framework to analyse the impact of heterogeneous technological progress on haze pollution using annual data from 30 provinces and cities in china for the period of 2003 to 2016 a systematic gmm method is applied to empirically test the effects of neutral technological progress and biased technological progress on haze pollution the results show that first due to cost reduction effect and income effect neutral technological progress and labour saving technological progress are conducive to haze reduction while the impact of capital saving technological progress on haze pollution is insignificant second because of the energy rebound effect energy saving technological progress cannot effectively reduce haze pollution third the haze reduction effects of different types of technological progress show significant regional heterogeneity in china last in terms of the control variables strengthening environmental regulation is the only factor that can be helpful in haze reduction others intensify haze pollution

green technologies and environmental productivity a cross sectoral analysis of direct and indirect effects in italian regions abstract this paper provides empirical investigation of the effects of environmental innovations eis on environmental performances as proxied by the environmental productivity ep measure we focus on sectoral environmental productivity of italian regions by exploiting the regional accounting matrix including environmental accounts regional namea patent applications have been extracted by the patstat database and assigned to the environmental domain by adopting different international classifications of green technologies the latest release of the oecd env tech indicators and the union of this with the previously established wipo green inventory econometric results outline that regions sectors characterized by higher levels of green technologies gts are those facing better environmental performance these positive effects directly stem from the introduction of gt in the same sector as well as from the introduction of gt in vertically related sectors

innovation and the international diffusion of environmentally responsive technology abstract new evidence is presented on environmental innovation and diffusion over the 1970s and 1980s at a global level a substantial amount of innovations occurred in the united states japan and germany the share of environmental patents in all patents varied between 0 6 and 3 and as such was higher than the corresponding share of pollution abatement expenditure in gdp japanese environmental innovation rates were consistently high certain plausible connections between environmental regulation and innovation also emerge across these three countries and over time innovation responded to pollution abatement expenditure an indicator of the severity of environmental regulations environmental patenting rates in developing countries were also high reaching 2 in many years in brazil developing country innovators obtained a non trivial number of patents most of which appear geared towards adapting imported technologies to local conditions however domestic innovation was only one path to new technologies imports of disembodied environmental technologies foreign patents registered in developing countries were substantial foreign patents were typically important or generic patents evidence also suggests that such patents protected intellectual property in equipment exported developing countries especially in east asia often chose to obtain technologies embodied in pollution abatement equipment