tariff effects on mnc decisions to engage in intra firm and arm s length trade using confidential firm level data from the bureau of economic analysis bea on activities of u s multinational corporations mncs and their canadian affiliates we study the dramatic growth of intra firm and arm s length u s canada trade over the 1984 95 period we find that decisions to engage in intra firm and arm s length trade are essentially unrelated to tariff and transport cost reductions over this sample period thus we find that the increase in trade occurred almost entirely on the intensive rather than the extensive margin this is consistent with case study evidence in keane and feinberg 2006 where mnc executives consistently indicate that the modest tariff reductions of the 1984 95 period were not sufficient to justify fixed costs of overhauling international supply chains our results have important implications for recent influential models of international trade that rely on sensitivity of intra firm trade to tariffs at the extensive margin to explain how small tariff declines could have led to the explosion of intra firm trade since the 1980s we also find that initial conditions i e 1983 tariffs are uncorrelated with whether firms engaged in intra firm or arm s length trade activity at the start of the sample period this result is surprising as it implies that firms industries with a greater propensity to engage in trade were not in general successful at lobbying for more favourable tariff treatment a l aide de donnees confidentielles au niveau de la firme du bureau of economic analysis bea a propos des activites des firmes plurinationales fpn americaines et de leurs succursales canadiennes on etudie la croissance dramatique du commerce usa canada tant intra firme qu a bout de bras pour la periode 1984 95 il appert que les decisions de s engager dans l un et l autre commerce sont fondamentalement non reliees aux reductions des couts de transport et des tarifs au cours de cette periode on decouvre que l accroissement du commerce s est produit presqu entierement a la marge intensive plutot qu a la marge extensive c est en ligne avec les resultats de l etude de cas de keane et feinberg 2006 ou les cadres des fpn ont systematiquement indique que les modestes reductions de tarifs entre 1984 et 1995 n etaient pas suffisantes pour justifier les couts fixes impliques par la modification de leurs chaines de production internationales ces resultats ont des implications importantes pour certains modeles influents de commerce international qui sont ancres dans une sensibilite du commerce intra firme aux tarifs a la marge extensive pour expliquer comment de faibles chutes de tarifs ont pu engendrer une explosion du commerce intra firme depuis les annees 80 on montre aussi que les conditions initiales e g les tarifs de 1983 ne sont pas co reliees avec le fait que la firme est engagee ou non dans l un ou l autre commerce en debut de periode le resultat est surprenant parce qu il implique que firmes et industries ayant une plus grande propension a commercer n ont pas eu de succes dans leur lobby pour obtenir un traitement tarifaire plus favorable

boon or burden the effect of private sector debt on the risk of sovereign default in developing countries i introduction the past two decades witnessed a strong increase in private foreign borrowing in emerging markets and developing countries although in 1990 the private sector accounted for a mere 16 of all external loans disbursed to developing countries this share has increased to 77 in 2006 figure 1a likewise in 2006 the private sector s non publicly guaranteed debt liabilities accounted for 44 of developing countries total external debt up from a mere 5 in 1990 figure 1b 1 a key question in light of the ongoing global financial turmoil is what the boom in private sector external indebtedness will imply for sovereign risk in developing countries in this paper we empirically investigate the record of the past three decades to throw some light on this issue on theoretical grounds there are arguments both in favor and against a stabilizing effect of private sector borrowing on sovereign risk a critical view of private sector exposure is based on the notion that large scale private borrowing creates vulnerabilities that may eventually lead to a sovereign default a sudden stop may force the public sector to assume at least part of the private debt and this may eventually cause debt service difficulties for the government following this logic both public and private external debt pose a threat to sovereign creditworthiness the opposite argument that private sector borrowing does not harm government creditworthiness can be made by invoking the idea that the private sector is exposed to greater competitive pressure which raises the incentives to use the borrowed funds productively more importantly a potentially stabilizing role of private sector borrowing can also be linked to the distributional consequences of sovereign defaults agents who are reliant on foreign credit are particularly vulnerable to the disruptions that come along with sovereign default a larger share of the private sector in total external debt a proxy of the relative size and stake of agents that would be hurt by sovereign default would thus raise the political costs of default given the competing theoretical arguments the role of the private sector for sovereign creditworthiness is an empirical question a first impression of how these magnitudes may be related is provided in figure 2 which plots the institutional investor s measure of country creditworthiness iiccr against the level of external debt relative to gni figure 2a and the share of private long term external debt in countries total long term external debt figure 2b 2 not surprisingly the correlation between debt and creditworthiness is negative 0 37 by contrast the correlation between private sector share and the iiccr is positive 0 54 3 although this picture obviously does not prove a causal relationship it suggests that relative private sector exposure and perceived creditworthiness might be positively related figure 1 omitted figure 2 omitted further evidence that private and public debt are likely to have very different effects on the risk of sovereign default is provided in table 1 the entries in this table are cross country averages of various debt related variables just before the onset of 5 yr periods in which a sovereign default did or did not take place 4 the first column of table 1 shows that initial debt relative to gni is on average much higher before a default period than before a non default period conversely column 2 indicates that the average share of the private sector in total external debt is much higher before non default periods than before default periods a first look at the data thus seems to point into the direction that a higher share of private debt in total external debt is associated with higher perceived creditworthiness as reflected by the institutional investor s country credit ratings and with a lower likelihood of sovereign default

when is external debt sustainable the article empirically examines the determinants of debt distress defined as periods in which countries resort to any of three forms of exceptional finance significant arrears on external debt paris club rescheduling and non concessional international monetary fund lending probit regressions show that three factors explain a substantial fraction of the cross country and time series variation in the incidence of debt distress the debt burden the quality of policies and institutions and shocks the relative importance of these factors varies with the level of development these results are robust to a variety of alternative specifications and the core specifications have substantial out of sample predictive power the quantitative implications of these results are examined for the lending strategies of official creditors

learning about a new technology pineapple in ghana this paper investigates the role of social learning in the diffusion of a new agri cultural technology in ghana we use unique data on farmers communication patterns to define each individual s information neighborhood conditional on many potentially confounding variables we find evidence that farmers adjust their inputs to align with those of their information neighbors who were surpris ingly successful in previous periods the relationship of these input adjustments to experience further indicates the presence of social learning in addition applying the same method to input choices for another crop of known technol ogy correctly indicates an absence of social learning effects jel d83 013 033 q16

specialized supply firms property rights and firm boundaries the proper specification of intellectual property rights iprs is a delicate and controversial matter in this paper we consider one specialized context in which iprs can add to efficiency we build on contributions of both firm capabilities scholars e g teece pisano et al and property rights economists e g hart to show that iprs can affect efficiency by influencing the location of technological innovation using a simple set up where the key choice is whether a technology intensive input will be supplied by an independent firm or produced in house we analyze how the choice is affected by the strength of iprs and by the existence and nature of information spillovers specifically we show that when the supply relationship is likely to produce new information of value to the supplier stronger property rights favor independent suppliers over vertical integration an important implication of our model backed by empirical case studies is that strong iprs therefore encourage investments in specialized firms with strong firm capabilities in the area of innovative input supply iprs therefore may play a role along with multiple other factors in the location of firm boundaries in some cases this contribution to the viability of small specialized firms with their superior ability to innovate in some cases must be taken into account in evaluating recent criticisms of over fragmented ipr ownership i e the anticommons problem it also contributes to an understanding of iprs in the post chandlerian economy where smaller specialized firms play a prominent role copyright 2004 oxford university press

understanding innovation an analysis of persistence for spanish manufacturing firms abstract this study focuses on the persistence of innovation in a panel of spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1990 2008 in particular we analyse whether persistence in firms innovation activities over time is the result of previous experience the dynamic capabilities of the firm or industry market related characteristics we find that r d input and innovation output are highly persistent at the firm level after controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and initial conditions and by using a dynamic random effects probit we conclude that there are similar determinants of persistence in r d and innovative activities among external environmental factors market dynamism affects r d and innovation regarding firm specific characteristics size and outsourcing also have a positive impact on both processes past innovative behaviour is clearly more decisive in explaining the current state of r d and innovation activities than external factors or firm level heterogeneity

on sharks trolls and their patent prey unrealistic damage awards and firms strategies of being infringed abstract patent trolls or sharks are patent holding individuals or often small firms who trap r d intensive manufacturers in patent infringement situations in order to receive damage awards for the illegitimate use of their technology while of great concern to management their existence and impact for both corporate decision makers and policy makers remains to be fully analyzed from an academic standpoint in this paper we show why patent sharks can operate profitably why they are of growing concern how manufacturers can forearm themselves against them and which issues policy makers need to address to do so we map international indemnification rules with strategic rationales of small patent holding firms and large manufacturers within a theoretical model our central finding is that the courts unrealistic consideration of the trade offs faced by inadvertent infringers is a central condition for sharks to operate profitably

the geography of market failure edge effect externalities and the location and production patterns of organic farming abstract perceptions of increasing land scarcity and negative impacts of chemical based agriculture have led to increasing concern regarding the sustainability of food systems incompatible production processes among farming systems may lead to spatial conflicts and production losses between neighboring farms and the magnitude of such losses may depend not only on the scale of each activity but also on patterns of land use such conflicts can be classified as edge effect externalities spatial externalities whose marginal impacts decrease as distance from the border generating the negative impact increases this paper tests the hypothesis that edge effect externalities have influenced the location and production patterns of certified organic farms using data from california central valley certified organic farmers using concepts from landscape ecology and spatial statistics we investigate difference in parcel geometry and surrounding land uses between organic and non organic parcels using a generalized method of moments gmm spatially autoregressive econometric model we demonstrate that both parcel geometry and surrounding land uses influence the probability of a given parcel being certified organic we conclude with suggestions for policies to encourage development of organic farming regions

collateral damage for r d manufacturers how patent sharks operate in markets for technology patent sharks small firms that exploit information asymmetries in markets for technology to gain patent based competitive advantages challenge established theory by which i markets for technology benefit large firms and ii intellectual property rights systems strictly support markets for technology empirically linking the sharks different assault strategies to the patents they deploy we illustrate that patent sharks will likely be an enduring phenomenon in markets for technology we discuss policy and strategy implications copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

entry into pharmaceutical submarkets a bayesian panel probit analysis summary we study entry into pharmaceutical submarkets by using a dynamic panel probit model we develop a bayesian version of wooldridge s approach to dealing with unobserved heterogeneity we distinguish between greenfield entry entry with first product and undifferentiated entry which may take the form of introducing further products we extend the standard reduced form model to consider company size in the submarket and across all submarkets we find that greenfield and undifferentiated entries have different determinants that global and submarket size measures have different effects and that sunk costs often have positive effects on entry due to a commitment mechanism copyright 2012 john wiley sons ltd

economic policy uncertainty and sovereign credit rating decisions panel quantile evidence for the eurozone we employ a panel quantile framework that quantifies the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative factors across the conditional distribution of sovereign credit ratings in the eurozone area we find that regulatory quality and competitiveness have a stronger impact for low rated countries whereas gdp per capita is a major driver of high rated countries a reduction in the current account deficit leads to a rating or outlook upgrade for low rated countries economic policy uncertainty impacts negatively on credit ratings across the conditional distribution however the impact is stronger for the lower rated countries in other words the creditworthiness of low rated countries takes a much bigger hit than that of high rated countries when european policy uncertainty is on the rise

patent trolls on markets for technology an empirical analysis of npes patent acquisitions abstract patent trolls or npes appropriate profits from innovation solely by enforcing patents against infringers they are often characterized as relying on low quality patents an assessment that if correct would imply that eradicating such patents would effectively terminate the npe business in this paper we shed light on this issue by empirically analyzing npes patent acquisitions we draw on a unique dataset of 392 u s patents acquired by known npes between 1997 and 2006 which we compare to three control groups of 784 u s patents each acquired by practicing firms we find that the probability that a traded patent is acquired by an npe rather than a practicing entity increases in the scope of the patent in the patent density of its technology field and contrary to common belief in the patent s technological quality our findings thus support recent theoretical propositions about the npe business model showing that npes procure patents that are more likely to be infringed harder to substitute for and robust to legal challenges the fact that npe acquired patents are of significantly higher quality than those in the control group implies that elevating minimum patent quality will not put an end to the npe business and suggests that this business is sustainable in the long run we furthermore discuss the fact that npes are peculiar players on markets for technology insofar as they are solely interested in the exclusion right not in the underlying knowledge we posit that transactions involving npes may only be the tip of the iceberg of patent only transactions a conjecture with strong implications for the efficiency and the study of markets for technologies managerial and policy implications are discussed

litigation and settlement in patent infringement cases a patent grants its owner the right to sue intruders that have been identified the patentholder must then supervise the market and react in case of infringement his reaction may be to go to court to settle or to accept entry we investigate how intensive the monitoring effort should be and how it will influence the entry decision in a simultaneous game even if the penalty paid by the infringer in case of a finding of liability is high the patentholder may prefer a settlement to a trial the likelihood of entry may increase with the penalty in sequential games regardless who plays first entry occurs comparatively less often than in the simultaneous game

tilting the table the use of preliminary injunctions abstract this paper examines the economic role of preliminary injunctions in legal disputes we present a model in which differences in financing costs drive the use of preliminary injunction and explore the implications of this legal remedy for ex post efficiency and ex ante incentives controlling for the nature of the dispute we examine the relationships between the financial status of litigating parties and whether a preliminary injunction is requested the empirical analysis uses detailed data compiled for a sample of 252 patent suits and reveals patterns generally consistent with those suggested by the model

the changing technology of technological change general and abstract knowledge and the division of innovative labour abstract in the past most innovations have resulted from empiricist procedures the outcome of each trial yielding knowledge that could not be readily extended to other contexts while trial and error may remain the primary engine of innovation developments in many scientific disciplines along with progress in computational capabilities and instrumentation are encouraging a new approach to industrial research instead of relying purely on trial and error the attempt is also to understand the principles governing the behaviour of objects and structures the result is that relevant information whatever its source can now be cast in frameworks and categories that are more universal the greater universality makes it possible for the innovation process to be organised in new ways firms can specialise and focus upon producing new knowledge and the locus of innovation may be spread across both users and producers more generally the use of general and abstract knowledge in innovation opens up the possibility for a division of labour in inventive activity the division of innovative labour the implications for public policy especially that on intellectual property rights are discussed

the british low wage sector and the employment prospects of the unemployed abstractare low wages a way for the unemployed to switch to higher paying jobs using data from the british household panel survey the labour market dynamics of unemployed low paid and higher paid employed men are analysed moreover the respective un employment duration and occupational skill level are accounted for results show that in general low wages significantly reduce the risk of future unemployment and increase the chances of ascending the salary ladder especially in the case of long term unemployment 360 days furthermore the occupational skill level has a substantial influence on the upward mobility of low paid jobs individuals working in the initial period in a low paid and higher skilled occupation have on average an 11 percentage points higher probability of entering higher pay compared to when working in a low paid and low skilled occupation

state dependence and heterogeneity in health using a bias corrected fixed effects estimator this paper considers the estimation of a dynamic ordered probit of self assessed health status with two fixed effects one in the linear index equation and one in the cut points the two fixed effects allow us to robustly control for heterogeneity in unobserved health status and in reporting behaviour even though we can not separate both sources of heterogeneity the contributions of this paper are twofold first it contributes to the literature that studies the determinants and dynamics of self assessed health measures second this paper contributes to the recent literature on bias correction in nonlinear panel data models with fixed effects by applying and studying the finite sample properties of two of the existing proposals to our model the most direct and easily applicable correction to our model is not the best one and has important biases in our sample sizes

spatial interactions in multiple use forestry and substitution and wealth effects for the single stand abstract forestry models often ignore spatial relationships between forest stands this paper isolates the effects of stand interactions in multiple use forestry through a straightforward extension of the single stand model effects of stand interactions decompose into wealth and substitution effects and may cause time varying patterns of resource use for a forest stand simulations illustrate that a stand s role even in steady state may alternate an emphasis on timber with an emphasis on nontimber optimal management plans differ substantially depending on whether the manager values nonmarket goods from neighboring stands the model offers insights for improving heuristic forest level optimization models in current usage

coexistence rules and regulations in the european union the institutional environment for planting gm crops in europe is heterogeneous poland wants to ban the planting of gm crops spanish farmers have been growing bt maize for several years 120 communities in belgium have declared themselves to be gmo free a local grain trader in germany has announced that it will pay the same price for bt and non bt maize luxemburg wants to fine farmers up to 750 000 for non compliance with coexistence rules and in poland a prison sentence of up to three years may be given farmers in upper austria must apply for authorization for each field intended to be planted with gm crops and farmers in denmark have to pay a levy of 100 dk per hectare of gm crops in 2003 the european commission stated that no form of agriculture be it conventional organic or agriculture using genetically modified organism gmos should be excluded in the european union but simultaneously decided to follow the principle of subsidiary that measures for coexistence should be developed and implemented by the member states cec 2003a p 1 since then some member states have developed and others are still developing a diversity of coexistence measures that may have a profound impact on the adoption rate of gm crops against this background we ask the following question how will the different coexistence policies among eu member states affect the adoption of gm crops

comment sequential moment restrictions in panel data 1992 comment sequential moment restrictions in panel data journal of business economic statistics vol 10 no 1 pp 20 26

measuring state dependence in individual poverty histories when there is feedback to employment status and household composition this paper argues that the assumption of strict exogeneity which is usually invoked in estimating models of state dependence with unobserved heterogeneity is violated in the poverty context as important variables determining contemporaneous poverty status in particular employment status and household composition are likely to be influenced by past poverty outcomes therefore a model of state dependence is developed that explicitly allows for possible feedback effects from past poverty to future employment and household composition outcomes empirical results based on data from the german socio economic panel gsoep suggest that there are indeed such feedback effects and that failure to take them into account may lead to biased estimates of the state dependence effect copyright 2009 john wiley sons ltd

simple solutions to the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity i study a simple widely applicable approach to handling the initial conditions problem in dynamic nonlinear unobserved effects models rather than attempting to obtain the joint distribution of all outcomes of the endogenous variables i propose finding the distribution conditional on the initial value and the observed history of strictly exogenous explanatory variables the approach is flexible and results in simple estimation strategies for at least three leading dynamic nonlinear models probit tobit and poisson regression i treat the general problem of estimating average partial effects and show that simple estimators exist for important special cases copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

agri environmental policy and urban development patterns a general equilibrium analysis this paper investigates the spatial effects that the provision of environmental public goods have on residential location choices in a suburban context specifically a spatial general equilibrium framework is developed to analyze the consequences of adopting an agri environmental policy promoting the provision of positive farming externalities we use a static monocentric model of an open city where agricultural bid rents and agricultural amenities vary endogenously in space and where the positive externalities associated with agricultural production are valued by households consistent with empirical evidence of the potential side effects that conservation policies may have in terms of urbanization patterns and land price changes we show that under certain conditions implementing an agri environmental policy may promote additional suburban development moreover we demonstrate that the emergence of disconnected suburban areas may be significantly influenced by the location of land regulated by an agri environmental policy finally we discuss distributional aspects and show that while introducing an agri environmental policy has a negative impact on most residential land value it can have positive effects on farmland and residential land located within the regulated areas suggesting the non neutrality of such policies regarding the agents assets

damages and injunctions in protecting intellectual property we investigate how liability rules and property rules protect intellectual property infringement might not be deterred under any of the enforcement regimes available however counterintuitively a credible threat of infringement can actually benefit the patentholder we compare the two doctrines of damages lost profit lost royalty and unjust enrichment and argue that unjust enrichment protects the patentholder better than lost royalty in the case of proprietary research tools both can be superior to a property rule depending on how much delay is permitted before infringement is enjoined for other proprietary products end user products cost reducing innovations these conclusions can be reversed

the dynamics of health in the british household panel survey this paper considers the dynamics of a categorical indicator of self assessed health using eight waves 1991 1998 of the british household panel survey bhps our analysis has three focal points the relative contributions of state dependence and heterogeneity in explaining the dynamics of health the existence and consequences of health related sample attrition and the investigation of the effects of measures of socioeconomic status with a particular focus on educational attainment and income to investigate these issues we use dynamic panel ordered probit models there is clear evidence of health related attrition in the data but this does not distort the estimates of state dependence and of the socioeconomic gradient in health the models show strong positive state dependence and heterogeneity accounts for around 30 of the unexplained variation in health copyright 2004 john wiley sons ltd

efficient patent pools the paper builds a tractable model of patent pools agreements among patent owners to license sets of their patents it provides a necessary and sufficient condition for patent pools to enhance welfare and shows that requiring pool members to be able to independently license patents matters if and only if the pool is otherwise welfare reducing the paper allows patents to differ in importance asymmetric blocking patterns and licensors to also be licensees we undertake some initial exploration of the impact of pools on innovation the analysis has broader applicability than pools being relevant to a number of co marketing arrangements

state dependence in the incidence of strikes evidence from canadian contract data using heckman s dynamic probit model abstract this paper considers whether there is state dependence in strike incidence using longitudinal contract data from canada i obtain my estimates using heckman s estimator for dynamic probit models and find that there is no state dependence in strike incidence

learning by doing and learning from others human capital and technical change in agriculture household level panel data from a nationally representative sample of rural indian households describing the adoption and profitability of high yielding seed varieties hyvs associated with the green revolution are used to test the implications of a model incorporating learning by doing and learning spillovers the estimates indicate that i imperfect knowledge about the management of the new seeds was a significant barrier to adoption ii this barrier diminished as farmer experience with the new technologies increased iii own experience and neighbors experience with hyvs significantly increased hyv profitability and iv farmers do not fully incorporate the village returns to learning in making adoption decisions

estimation of fractional dependent variables in dynamic panel data models with an application to firm dividend policy fractional dependent variables and models with state dependence arise in many economic applications however estimating models with fractional dependent variables is complicated by the presence of two corner solution outcomes when coupled with a dynamic panel data setting estimating quantities of interest can be quite complex or computationally difficult this article demonstrates a method for estimating fractional response variables which is easy to implement and presents an application of the technique to the determination of firm dividend policy the estimation demonstrates that neglecting dynamics unobserved heterogeneity or the doubly censored nature of the dependent variable can generate misleading conclusions

bayesian spatial probit estimation a primer and an application to hyv rice adoption increasingly spatial econometric methods are becoming part of the standard toolkit of applied researchers in agricultural environmental and development economics nonetheless applications in discrete choice settings remain few and despite its appeal applications of the bayesian paradigm in these settings are still fewer we provide a primer to the bayesian spatial probit with the objective of making accessible to non users a class of iterative estimation methods that have become fairly routine in bayesian circles offer an extremely powerful addition to applied researchers toolkits and are essential in bayesian implementation of spatial econometric models we demonstrate the methods and apply them to estimate the neighbourhood effect in high yielding variety hyv adoption among bangladeshi rice producers we estimate the strength of this relationship using a standard spatial probit model and compare the policy conclusions with and without the neighbourhood effect included

globalization local ecosystems and the rural poor summary in this paper we draw upon models from ecology and new institutional economics to examine the various mechanisms through which globalization can lead to loss in resilience of ecosystems and thus increase the vulnerability of poor people who depend on it to illustrate ecological dynamics we examine a semi arid savanna ecosystem that is characterized by nonlinearities and multiple steady states we discuss how traditional knowledge and institutions affect resource use patterns and resilience of such an ecosystem in the absence of trade then we examine the effects of trade liberalization and international technology transfers on institutional and ecological dynamics and consequently on poverty

dynamics of female labour force participation in france abstractthis article formulates and estimates a structural intertemporal model of labour force participation relying on theoretical characterizations derived from an economic model of lifetime behaviour we estimate a dynamic probit model with correlated random effects using longitudinal data to allow for a dynamic structure the model is applied to a panel of married women drawn from the 1997 2002 french labour force surveys in order to represent their participation behaviour it is estimated by maximum simulated likelihood our results show that women s decisions to go out to work are characterized by significant state dependence unobserved heterogeneity and negative serial correlation in the transitory error component in addition we find that the presence of young children in a woman s household reduces her labour participation but unequally according to their age and number as expected educational level has a positive impact on women s participation last a rise in the husband s wage is found

ghg registries participation and performance under the canadian voluntary climate challenge program between 1994 and 2004 the voluntary challenge and registry vcr played an important role in canadian climate change policy in this paper we examine the decision of firms to participate in the vcr the extent of their involvement and then ask if greenhouse gas emissions are related to past vcr participation as an information provision program we find evidence that firms may participate in vcr to signal their environmental responsibility to regulators and to some extent investors but not to consumers we also find that past involvement in the vcr is a strong and significant determinant of current involvement in the registry greenhouse gas emissions reported to the mandatory greenhouse gas reporting program in 2004 however do not appear to be different between vcr reporters and non reporters ghg emissions are observed to be significantly lower among firms that are smaller emit fewer toxic releases use more renewable energy sources are intermediate good producers and are located in quebec ontario and manitoba

the market for elective surgery joint estimation of supply and demand this paper develops models of the demand for and supply of elective non emergency surgery using a panel of quarterly data for 200 english hospitals over the period 1995 2002 unusually distinct measures of supply outpatients seen and inpatient admissions and demand outpatient referrals and decisions to admit are available for each observation these offer the opportunity to estimate separate empirical models of supply and demand using ordinary least squares ols regression methods however the strong correlation between the residuals of these models suggests some merit in the deployment of seemingly unrelated regression sur methods although both static and dynamic sur estimations leave the results largely qualitatively unchanged sur estimation can have a considerable quantitative effect relative to the ols results for example sur estimation generates a lower elasticity of inpatient demand with respect to waiting time than that obtained via ols the results offer an important justification for more careful econometric modelling of hospital behaviour than has traditionally been employed in the health economics literature

temporal and spatial modelling of tropical deforestation a survival analysis linking satellite and household survey data we estimate a spatially explicit model of the forest clearance process among smallholder farmers in an agricultural frontier of southern mexico our analysis takes as its point of departure a simple utility maximising model that suggests many possible determinants of deforestation in an economic environment characterised by missing or thin markets hypotheses from the model are tested on a data set that combines a time series of satellite imagery with data collected from a survey of farm households whose agricultural plots were geo referenced using a global positioning system gps we implement a survival analysis to identify the effect of household level explanatory variables on the probability of deforestation this approach allows us to introduce a measure of the time until clearance as a covariate thereby affording a control for the effect of potentially important explanatory variables that vary through time but are not directly observable in addition to identifying several variables relevant for policy analysis including household demographics proximity to roads and government provision of agricultural support model results suggest that the deforestation process is characterised by non linear duration dependence with the probability of forest clearance first decreasing and then increasing with the passage of time

patents as indicators of corporate technological strength abstract quantitative indicators of the technological strengths of individual companies would be an important addition to the financial and economic data used in competitor assessments merger acquisition analyses investment decisions and corporate planning and management this paper examines the links between corporate patent and patent citation data and several other indicators of corporate performance changes in sales and profits research and development budgets scientific productivity and expert opinions of company technological strength the study covers 17 us pharmaceutical companies for which financial r d and expert opinion data were readily available for these pharmaceutical companies it was found that the patent data are an excellent indicator of overall corporate technological strength with 1 an overall correlation of 0 82 between expert opinion of pharmaceutical company technical strength and the number of us patents granted to the companies and 2 correlations in the general range of 0 6 to 0 9 between increases in company profits and sales and both patent citation frequency and concentration of company patents within a few patent classes

spatial externalities in agriculture empirical analysis statistical identification and policy implications summary spatial externalities can affect economic welfare and landscape pattern by linking farm returns on adjoining parcels of land while policy can be informed by research that documents spatial externalities statistically quantifying the presence of externalities from landscape pattern is insufficient for policy guidance unless the underlying cause of the externality can be identified as positive or negative this article provides a springboard for empirical research by examining the underlying structure social environmental interactions and statistical identification strategies for the analysis and the quantification of agricultural spatial externalities that are derived from observations of landscape change the potential for original policy treatments of agricultural spatial externalities in development and environment outcomes is highlighted

capturing household level spatial influence in agricultural management using random effects regression abstract data on agricultural and natural resource management typically have spatial patterns related to the landscapes from which they came consequently econometric models designed to explain the determinants of humans natural resource management practices or their outcomes often have spatial structure that can bring bias or inefficiency to parameter estimates although econometric tools are available to correct for spatial structure such tools are largely lacking for use with discrete dependent variable models while one obvious solution would be to develop the necessary tools an alternative is to identify conditions under which spatial dependency can be managed effectively without formal spatial autoregressive models this study examines conditions under which spatial structure corresponds closely to defined agro ecological zones making it possible to model spatial effects by random effects regression using household survey data sampled along agro ecological zone strata this article develops two models of links between farmer assets and agricultural natural resource degradation in southern peru the first stage model looks at determinants of crop yield loss over time an index of soil productivity while the second stage model looks at determinants of the extent of fallow cycles in crop rotation a key agricultural practice reducing crop yield loss diagnostic statistics for spatial dependency reveal spatial structure particularly in the fallow model this spatial dependency is eliminated in the ordinary least squares ols models by inclusion of the agro ecological zone random effects in the spatially dependent fallow model comparison of coefficient estimates between ols and the spatial autoregressive maximum likelihood models showed ols with random effects to give virtually identical results to the spatial autoregressive models making the latter unnecessary these results show that spatial structure in natural resource management models can sometimes be captured by zonal variables when this occurs random effects regression can largely eliminate spatial dependency a necessary precondition for this approach with household survey data is prior sample stratification according to landscape characteristics where random effects models can effectively capture spatial structure they may also offer analysts greater flexibility in analyzing models with limited dependent variables

testing for choice dynamics in panel data this article applies different approaches to distinguish state dependence from unobserved heterogeneity and serial correlation and hence test for state dependence in consumer brand choices first we apply a simple method proposed by chamberlain which involves lagged exogenous variables only second we also estimate a lagged dependent variable specification proposed by wooldridge third we use the estimation approach suggested by wooldridge to estimate a model with both lagged dependent and exogenous variables to distinguish between the two different sources of choice dynamics state dependence and lagged effects of the exogenous variables our analysis reveals that the best approach is to use models with both lagged dependent and exogenous variables our findings include strong evidence for state dependence in five out of the six product categories studied in this article

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

the dynamics of aid and political rights using cross country panel data we explore the extent to which the variation over time in measures of democracy and political rights can be explained by changes in aid inflows thus providing direct evidence on the impact of innovations in donor policy on the quality of recipient governance we distinguish between the short run and long run effects of changes in aid our results are very different from those based on cross country variation in aid inflows we find evidence of large differences between the effect of aid for political reform and the effect of other types of aid in aggregate these effects also depend on the recipient country s initial level of political development there is no evidence that aid intended for political reform has achieved its objective and in some countries it may be counterproductive however aggregate aid can have a beneficial effect on political rights

discrete choice with social interactions this paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioural outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects we study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behaviour of others in an environment of noncooperative decisionmaking laws of large numbers are generated in such environments multiplicity of equilibria in these models which are equivalent to the existence of multiple self consistent means for average choice behaviour will exist when the social interactions exceed a particular threshold local stability of these multiple equilibria is also studied the properties of the noncooperative economy are contrasted with the properties of an economy in which a social planner determines the set of individual choices finally a likelihood function based on the theoretical model is given and conditions for the econometric identifiability of the model are established

no money no honey financial versus knowledge and demand constraints on innovation the paper adds to the literature on the barriers to innovation in two ways first we assess comparatively what mostly constrains firms ability to translate investment in innovation activity into new products and processes whether it is mainly finance as most of the literature would suggest or whether it is mostly knowledge and market related aspects second we suggest a method to correct for the sample selection bias that often affects empirical contributions to this scholarship by filtering out firms that are not interested in innovation from those that struggle to engage in it we obtain a relevant sample of potential innovators which allows us to analyse the comparative effect of financial and non financial barriers on innovation success we find that demand side factors particularly concentrated market structure and lack of demand are as important as financial constraints in determining firms innovation failures this evidence redirects attention from financial to non financial barriers by considering traditional demand market structure and regulation factors involved in reduced firm innovation performance the empirical analysis is based on an unbalanced panel of firm level data from four waves of the uk community innovation survey cis between 2002 and 2010 merged with data from the uk business structure database

whose wages do unions raise a dynamic model of unionism and wage rate determination for young men we estimate the union premium for young men over a period of declining unionization 1980 87 through a procedure which identifies the alternative sources of the endogeneity of union status while we estimate the average increase in wages resulting from union employment to be in excess of 20 we find that the return to unobserved heterogeneity operating through union status is substantial and that the union premium is highly variable we also find that the premium is sensitive to the form of sorting allowed in estimation moreover the data are consistent with comparative advantage sorting our results suggest that the unobserved heterogeneity which positively contributes to the likelihood of union membership is associated with higher wages we are unable however to determine whether this is due to the ability of these workers to extract monopoly rents or whether it reflects the more demanding hiring standards of employers faced by union wages 1998 john wiley sons ltd

measuring regional diversification of environmental externalities in agriculture and the effectiveness of their reduction by eu agri environmental programs in poland abstract the problem of externalities is an important aspect of contemporary discussion about the directions of agricultural development and agricultural policy nonetheless measuring agri environmental externalities is a difficult task and rarely undertaken in scientific research in our research we have constructed a synthetic indicator that allows measuring agri environmental externalities at the regional level taking into account both positive and negative effects at the same time we also studied the extent to which our synthetic indicator can be used to inform about the effectiveness of subsidies paid to farmers in the european union under agri environmental programs in reduction of externalities generated by agriculture we concluded that the use of subsidies under agri environmental programs has a positive impact on reducing externalities generated by agricultural production measured by our indicator

semiparametric bayesian inference for dynamic tobit panel data models with unobserved heterogeneity summary this paper develops semiparametric bayesian methods for inference of dynamic tobit panel data models our approach requires that the conditional mean dependence of the unobserved heterogeneity on the initial conditions and the strictly exogenous variables be specified important quantities of economic interest such as the average partial effect and average transition probabilities can be readily obtained as a by product of the markov chain monte carlo run we apply our method to study female labor supply using a panel data set from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

coexistence of gm and non gm crops with endogenously determined separation the possibility that genetically modified gm crops may contaminate non gm crops through pollen mediated gene flow presents a challenge to coexistence of gm agriculture with conventional and organic farming systems in this paper an analytical model of coexistence is developed that allows for endogenous derivation of efficient widths and allocation of pollen barriers to limit contamination of non gm crops to reflect the uncertainty that surrounds pollen dispersal mechanisms the model contains a stochastic contamination function and safety rule decision mechanism constraining the level of contamination to remain below a tolerated adventitious presence with a given probability two policies are considered and their performance is tested the tolerance level of adventitious presence and the allocation of responsibility for implementing coexistence measures to either gm or non gm farmers the relative size of gm rents the value of productivity gains and the non pecuniary benefits from gm crops rents for identity preserved non gm crops price premiums realised over the gm crop price characteristics of farms and possible variation in agricultural landscapes are also taken into account the findings indicate that conventional adventitious presence tolerances can be met without ex ante mandating large widths of pollen barriers at the policy level the findings of this paper are relevant for setting region specific pollen barriers widths and or for establishing institutions that facilitate cooperative coexistence

pigs in space modeling the spatial structure of hog production in traditional and nontraditional production regions we posit a spatially explicit county level model of the hog production sector and estimate how numerous firm specific locality specific and spatial agglomeration factors affect the location movement and intensity of hog production within 15 key hog production states spatial agglomeration urban encroachment input availability firm productivity local economy slaughter access and regulatory stringency variables affect the sample regions spatial organization analyses suggest that western states in the sample may shape hog production levels by wielding traditional business recruitment and retention tools e g tax rates environmental stringency while corn belt states may shape hog production via nontraditional tools e g land use controls few sectors have undergone more rapid change in scale structure and organization than the u s swine sector in the past two decades movement to large scale specialized production units reflects past trends in western cattle feeding and dairy enterprises while increasing vertical coordination resembles patterns adopted in the poultry sector several decades ago accompanying these changes in production has been a simultaneous change in the spatial organization of u s hog production industry analysts have forwarded several stylized facts of this spatial reorganization traditional corn belt states have lost in terms of national share of hog production to southeastern great plains and mountain states during the 1980s and 1990s drabenstott hurt as the firms offering swine production and marketing contracts attempt to locate large scale facilities where there are few people cheap land

third party intervention and the preservation of bargaining relationships this article uses longitudinal bargaining contract data to examine whether third party dispute resolution procedures improve the health of bargaining relationships and contribute to their preservat

does government funding complement or substitute private research funding to universities abstract there is growing political pressure on universities to intensify their interaction with industry and to enlarge their own research funding options in a context characterised by increasing constraints on public spending however whether the successful achievement of such a political desired outcome is consistent with a restriction of government funding is not clear and requires further investigation as a matter of fact there is scant empirical evidence on whether and to what extent government funding affects the external funding options available to universities in particular those related to research and consulting activities by using a set of probit and tobit panel data models estimated on financial data for the whole population of italian university departments engaged in research in the engineering and physical sciences this paper provides evidence that government funding to universities complements funding from research contracts and consulting contributing to increasing universities collaboration with industry and activating knowledge transfer processes

patent litigation with endogenous disputes the recent explosion of patenting and patent disputes has sparked a growing literature on the economics of patent litigation generally models in this literature take the existence of a dispute as given this assumption is troubling because it hampers the interpretation of empirical studies of patent litigation and the assessment of many patent policy reforms disputes would not arise if all technology adopters obtained ex ante licenses from patent owners this suggests that two stories could explain the origin of patent disputes in one the technology adopter observes a patented technology but chooses to imitate inventing around and or hiding the infringement in the other the adopter develops his own technology and is unaware of another firm s putative patent rights this kind of innocent infringement occurs because patent rights often have uncertain boundaries or questionable validity in addition the sheer number of patents facing a typical innovator makes careful assessment quite burdensome furthermore patent claims are often hidden sometimes strategically until after firms have made technology investments these two accounts suggest that a model of disputes should consider the decisions of patent owners to invent to patent and to monitor use of the patented technology by others and the decisions of potential infringers to monitor extant patents and develop and adopt new technology claude crampes and corinne langinier 2002 endogenize disputes by focusing on a patent owner s monitoring activity and imitative behavior by potential infringers our model includes this behavior but it also includes defendants who invent around a patent and defendants who are unaware of the patented technology we find that this richer model generates testable implications that better match empirical evidence on patent litigation

the patent paradox revisited an empirical study of patenting in the u s semiconductor industry 1979 1995 we examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to r d yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid1980s we explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the patenting behavior of 95 u s semiconductor firms during 1979 1995 the results suggest that the 1980s strengthening of u s patent rights spawned patent portfolio races among capital intensive firms but it also facilitated entry by specialized design firms

are there spatial spillovers in the adoption of clean technology the case of organic dairy farming this paper examines spatial spillovers associated with the adoption of organic dairy farming we hypothesize that neighboring farmers can help to reduce the uncertainty of organic conversion by lowering the fixed costs of learning about the organic system a spatially explicit 10 year panel dataset of more than 1 900 dairy farms in southwestern wisconsin is used as input into a reduced form econometric model of the decision to convert to organic production using an identification strategy that exploits the panel aspect of the micro dataset we find evidence that the presence of neighboring organic dairy farms affects the conversion decision

poverty and social exclusion two sides of the same coin or dynamically interrelated processes there is growing interest in the analysis and measurement of social exclusion to complement the static and dynamic literature on income poverty on theoretical grounds social exclusion and income poverty are seen as different processes but with closely interrelated dynamics however our empirical understanding of the way these two processes dynamically interact at the individual level is still very limited to shed some light on the issue we use a dynamic bivariate probit model controlling for unobserved heterogeneity and wooldridge 2005 type initial conditions both the first and second order markov dynamics are examined we estimate the model using the italian sample of the european community household panel echp waves 1 8 and find a sizable extent of state dependence in both poverty and social exclusion moreover there are dynamic cross effects implying that poverty and social exclusion are mutually reinforcing social policies aimed at eradicating poverty and avoiding individuals social

state dependence and stickiness of sovereign credit ratings evidence from a panel of countries using data from moody s we examine three sources of sovereign credit ratings persistence true state dependence spurious state dependence and serial error correlation accounting for ratings persistence we also examine whether ratings were sticky or procyclical for two major crises the european debt crisis and the east asian crisis we set up a dynamic panel ordered probit model with autocorrelated disturbances and nonparametrically distributed random effects an efficient markov chain monte carlo algorithm is designed for model estimation we find evidence of stickiness of ratings and of the three sources of ratings persistence with the true state dependence being weak

job search requirements for unemployed at the end of working life effects on unemployment dynamics and self employment probabilities this paper investigates the extent to which job search requirements in unemployment insurance u i increase the probability of self employment as a retirement route for causal identification we apply a difference in differences approach using a dutch 2004 policy reform that introduced job search requirements in u i for persons aged 57 5 and older unemployment dynamics and self employment probabilities are studied using a dynamic multinomial logit model with unobserved heterogeneity the results suggest that job search requirements stimulated people to exit unemployment and discouraged older workers to enter unemployment the probability of self employment as an exit route to retirement increased relative to u i but not relative to paid employment

a penny for your quotes patent citations and the value of innovations the use ofpatents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value and hence simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output the purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts the empirical analysis of a particular innovation computed tomography scanners indeed shows a close association between citation based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field moreover the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear increasing in the number of citations implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin as in previous studies simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous rd however here the association is within afield over time rather than cross sectional

poverty transition and persistence in ethiopia 1994 2004 summary this study analyzes the persistence of poverty in both rural and urban areas in ethiopia during 1994 2004 the key finding is that households move frequently in and out of poverty but the difficulty of exiting from poverty like the chance of avoiding slipping back increases with the time spent in that state and varies considerably between male and female headed households our results imply that it is important to design anti poverty policies both to hinder households from slipping into extreme poverty and to minimize the length of the poverty spell for households once they have fallen into it

split panel jackknife estimation of fixed effect models we propose a jackknife for reducing the order of the bias of maximum likelihood estimates of nonlinear dynamic fixed effect panel models in its simplest form the half panel jackknife the estimator is just 2 hat theta bar theta 1 2 where hat theta is the mle from the full panel and bar theta 1 2 is the average of the two half panel mles each using t 2 time periods and all n cross sectional units this estimator eliminates the first order bias of hat theta the order of the bias is further reduced if two partitions of the panel are used for example two half panels and three 1 3 panels and the corresponding mles on further partitioning the panel any order of bias reduction can be achieved the split panel jackknife estimators are asymptotically normal centered at the true value with variance equal to that of the mle under asymptotics where t is allowed to grow slowly with n in analogous fashion the split panel jackknife reduces the bias of the profile likelihood and the bias of marginal effect estimates simulations in fixed effect dynamic discrete choice models with small t show that the split panel jackknife effectively reduces the bias and mean squared error of the mle and yields confidence intervals with much better coverage

symmetric tragedies commons and anticommons an anticommons problem arises when there exist multiple rights to exclude in a lengthy law review paper michael a heller has examined the tragedy of the anticommons especially in regard to disappointing experiences with efforts to shift from socialist to market institutions in russia in an early footnote heller suggests that a formal economic model of the anticommons has not been developed this paper responds to heller s challenge we analyze the anticommons problem in which resources are inefficiently underutilized rather than overutilized as in the familiar commons setting the two problems are shown to be symmetrical in several respects we present an algebraic and geometric illustration and extend the discussion to several applications of greater importance we suggest that the construction is helpful in understanding the sources of major value wastage in modern regulatory bureaucracy the navigation of the danube is of very little use to the different states of bavaria austria and hungary in comparison of what it would be if any of them possessed the whole of its course till it falls into the black sea adam smith the wealth of nations 1776 bk 1 ch 3

borrowing from pui to pay pom multiple borrowing and over indebtedness in rural thailand summary rural financial markets have grown rapidly in asian emerging market economies thus contributing to economic development and the reduction of poverty at the same time however the level of indebtedness of rural households has increased making households more vulnerable to shocks one of the reasons for rising household debt is the ease of borrowing simultaneously from a growing number of lending institutions this paper addresses two major questions first does borrowing from multiple sources increase rural households risk of over indebtedness second do over indebted rural households refinance their outstanding loans through multiple borrowing running the risk of becoming trapped in a debt cycle employing a dynamic random effects bivariate probit model for a unique set of longitudinal household panel data from northeast thailand this study examines the bidirectional relationship between over indebtedness and multiple borrowing to determine to what extent rural households become trapped in debt cycles on the one hand the results indicate that households in northeast thailand take on multiple loans which further increases their risk of becoming over indebted on the other hand our model results do not confirm the widespread notion that over indebted rural households use multiple loans to refinance unpayable debts

environmental regulation and foreign direct investment evidence from south korea abstract this paper studies how environmental regulation shapes the pattern of foreign direct investment fdi and thereby assesses the pollution haven hypothesis conflicting results exist in the case studies examining the most advanced countries partly due to the deterrent effect of clean technology adoptions on industry migration to minimize the clean technology effect we examine the pattern of south korean fdi over 2000 2007 the period that korean firms relied on old production technologies despite facing rapidly strengthened environmental standards a difference in differences type identification strategy circumvents other potential confounders we find strong evidence that polluting industries tend to invest more in countries with laxer environmental regulations in terms of both the amount of investment intensive margin and the number of new foreign affiliates extensive margin a similar finding is obtained when imports are analyzed

a framework for estimating dynamic unobserved effects panel data models with possible feedback to future explanatory variables abstract i show how to construct the likelihood function for the conditional maximum likelihood estimator in dynamic unobserved effects models where not all conditioning variables are strictly exogenous the method for handling the initial conditions problem appears to be novel and offers a flexible relatively simple alternative to existing methods

crossing the innovation threshold through mergers and acquisitions firms are resorting more and more to mergers and acquisitions m a to bridge the gap between where they are and where they would like to be in relation to innovation and performance this paper investigates whether involvement in m a triggers distinct patterns of innovative behaviour across firms and whether this effect is conditional on firm size the analysis combines data from four waves of the community innovation survey cis and the business register of dutch manufacturing firms we observe that m as influence the probability that firms will begin innovation activities or persist with them and these effects vary at different points in the firm size distribution in particular by using m a firms are able to persist with the innovation efforts and output over time and this effect is especially strong for large firms for small firms m a help them to cross the innovation threshold increasing the probability of the transition from a non innovator to an active innovator however the m a effect does not mitigate the tendency of small firms to be occasional innovators