modeling technology adoptions for sustainable development under increasing returns uncertainty and heterogeneous agents abstract this paper presents a stylized model of technology adoptions for sustainable development under the three potentially most important stylized facts increasing returns to adoption uncertainty and heterogeneous agents following diverse technology development and adoption strategies the stylized model deals with three technologies and two heterogeneous agents a risk taking one and a risk averse one interactions between the two agents include trade in resources and goods and technological spillover free riding and technology trade with the two heterogeneous agents we run optimizations to minimize their aggregated costs in order to find out what rational behaviors are under different assumptions if the two agents are somehow cooperative by considering uncertain carbon taxes the model also addresses environmental issues as potential driving forces for technology adoptions

regional innovation systems theory empirics and policy asheim b t lawton smith h and oughton c regional innovation systems theory empirics and policy regional studies interest in regional innovation systems has grown significantly over the past three decades driven partly by advances in theoretical analysis partly by the growing interest in innovation as a source of competitive advantage and partly by the need for new policies to address regional inequalities and divergence this article explores the elements and characteristics that exemplify the regional innovation systems approach it provides an appraisal and synthesis of the regional innovation systems paradigm and aims to shed light on a number of areas where theoretical empirical and policy based questions remain unanswered it outlines and assesses the major strands in recent theoretical and empirical debates and discusses how they might be developed to contribute to the further advancement of the regional innovation systems literature three interrelated questions form the key themes arou

hrm practices r d expenditure and innovative investment evidence from the uk s 1990 workplace industrial relations survey wirs uk labour flexibility is often portrayed as necessary for an innovative economy using evidence from the uk s 1990 workplace industrial relations survey we investigate the relationships between firms human resource management practices and innovation our results suggest that low road hrm practices short term contracts etc are negatively correlated with investment in r d and new technology high road work practices high commitment organization and other systems are positively correlated with investment in r d and new technology copyright 1999 by oxford university press

energy conservation more effective with rebound policy this article sketches the problem of indirect energy use effects also known as rebound of energy conservation there is widespread support for energy conservation especially when it is voluntary as this seems a cheap way to realize environmental and energy climate goals however this overlooks the phenomenon of rebound the topic of energy rebound has mainly attracted attention from energy analysts but has been surprisingly neglected in environmental economics even though economists generally are concerned with indirect or economy wide impacts of technical change and policies this paper presents definitions and interpretations of energy and environmental rebound as well as four fundamental reasons for the existence of the rebound phenomenon it further offers the most complete list of rebound pathways or mechanisms available in the literature in addition it discusses empirical estimates of rebound and addresses the implications of uncertainties and difficulties in assessing rebound suggestions are offered for strategies and public policies to contain rebound it is advised that rebound evaluation is an essential part of environmental policy and project assessments as opposed to earlier studies this paper stresses the relevance of the distinction between energy conservation resulting from autonomous demand changes and from efficiency improvements in technology equipment in addition it argues that rebound is especially relevant for developing countries

optimizing systematic technology adoption with heterogeneous agents the traditional operational optimization models of systematic technology adoption commonly assume the existence of a global social planner and ignore the existence of heterogeneous decision makers who interact with each other this paper develops a stylized or conceptual optimization model of systematic technology adoption with heterogeneous agents i e decision makers and uncertain technological learning each agent attempts to identify optimal solutions to adopting technologies for a portion of the entire system the agents in the model have different foresight and different risk attitudes and interact with one another in terms of technological spillover this paper first illustrates that although a well recalibrated representative model can perform well enough when the interest is placed on aggregate variables it could react to a policy a carbon tax in this paper differently from the multi agent model then this paper explores how the agents heterogeneities and interactions affect the optimal solutions of systematic technology adoption the main findings of the study are that 1 the existence of multiple agents implies a slower adoption of advanced technologies in the entire system than assuming the existence of a global social planner 2 with homogeneous agents technological spillover tends to enhance the lock in effect on previous technologies and 3 with heterogeneous agents even a small technological spillover rate can significantly accelerate the adoption of the advanced technology

upgrading in global value chains lessons from latin american clusters it has been shown that clustering helps local enterprises in industrial districts overcome growth constraints and compete in distant markets in advanced and less developed countries nevertheless recent contributions have stressed that more attention needs to be paid to external linkages and to the role played by global buyers to foster upgrading at cluster levels in this study we contribute to this debate focusing on the analysis of the relationships existing between clustering global value chains upgrading and sectoral patterns of innovation in latin america we find that sectoral specificities matter and influence the mode and the extent of upgrading in clusters integrated in global value chains

conceptualising environmental responsibility abstract downstream responsibility is rarely addressed in the academic literature and in corporate sustainability reporting we conceptualise downstream responsibility for the example of carbon emissions by establishing a terminology as well as a framework for quantifying downstream carbon footprints by extracting emissions intensive sales chains for a number of australian industry sectors and comparing these to emissions intensive supply chains we demonstrated the ability of input output analysis to quantify emissions responsibility in both directions we extend the definition of downstream responsibility beyond the product use and disposal phases to include what we call enabled emissions this term implies that whatever is sold downstream enables our customers to operate and emit irrespective of whether it is our product that is combusted or that directly combusts fuels or not our structural path analyses and threshold capture relationships reveal stark differences between industries with regard to the data collection efforts necessary to achieve a reasonably complete footprint assessment industries appear to have their own specific carbon footprint profiles and one cannot design generic relevance tests that tell which data to collect moreover we conclude that current completeness standards in carbon reporting cannot be satisfied using relevance thresholds input output analysis and structural path analysis are excellent tools that can help companies undertake screening exercises which in turn help prioritising and streamlining the collection of data needed to establish a corporate downstream carbon footprint compared to conventional manual approaches hybrid life cycle assessments assisted by input output analysis and structural path analysis achieve more complete results with substantially less staff money and time

a study of the relationship between competitiveness and technological innovation capability based on dea models researchers and managers have been searching for appropriate methods to explore the relationship between technological innovation capability and competitiveness in recent years this study attempts to find a systematic quantitative methodology to tackle this problem in a recent survey covering 182 industrial innovative firms in china the traditional data envelopment analysis dea model was employed to analyze the data collected the research results show that only 16 of the enterprises operate on the best practice frontier and there are some inconsistencies between organizational innovation capability and competitiveness in many enterprises decreasing returns to scale were found among about 70 of the inefficient enterprises and increasing returns to scale were found among the remaining 30 of the inefficient enterprises thus the internal innovation harmonizing process in these enterprises is considerably inefficient based on the restricted ranges of the input output factors a multi objective dea projection model has also been developed in this study to provide a benchmark for auditing competitiveness research results further indicate that there is still much room for enterprises to improve competitiveness in situations of confining score ranges of technological innovation capability and competitiveness

demand pull technology push and government led incentives for non incremental technical change abstract rising expectations about future demand for new technologies increase the incentives for investments in innovation by enlarging payoffs to successful innovations how well does this notion of demand pull apply to non incremental technological change when demand is largely attributable to actions by governments in this case inventors of the most important inventions did not respond positively to strong demand pull policies filing of highly cited patents declined precipitously just as demand for wind power created a multi billion dollar market three explanations for this apparent inconsistency with the demand pull hypothesis played a role 1 the rapid convergence on a single dominant design limited the market opportunity for non incremental technical improvements 2 even though the policies implemented were stringent enough to stimulate demand uncertainty in their longevity dampened the incentives for inventions that were likely to take several years to pay off and 3 alternative explanations such as declining r d funding and weakening presidential engagement on energy appear to have been important

competitive dynamics and economic learning an extended resource based view in this paper a conceptual framework for the analysis of economic learning is developed economic learning by analogy with organizational learning results in the development of economic competences or capabilities shared between firms which rest on a foundation of economic resources from which value is generated and economic routines through which resources are utilized it is the mobility of resources and their exchange and production dynamics along evolutionary pathways which underpins the plausibility of a notion of economic learning the paper elaborates this framework as a resource based view rbv of the economy as a whole as an extension of the rbv of the firm such a framework captures the dynamics of exchange and circulation of technologies know how and intangible assets as well as of tangible assets and capital goods it is concerned with investment behavior by entrepreneurs rather than with the behavior of producers and consumers in goods and services markets within this resource economy framework it is possible to generate an account of the resource dynamics that underpin production of goods and services including resource propagation diffusion imitation replication and recombination these processes encompass evolutionary pressures experienced through resource variation selection and retention entrepreneurial initiatives take the form of resource recombinations while resource innovation captures the creation of new economic resources such as technological standards such a perspective brings into focus the resource specialization and configurations that drive real economies within firms and between firms that translates into enhanced or diminished performance of the economy as a whole copyright 2003 oxford university press

structural change and labor productivity growth in latin american manufacturing industries 1970 96 abstract this paper examines recent changes in the pattern of production specialization attained by latin american manufacturing industries comparing argentina brazil colombia chile and mexico to the united states the paper identifies catching up and lagging behind industries during 1970 96 it considers the evolution of macro and micro forces that affect whether an industry manages to close down the gap with the international technological frontier evidence is presented showing that recent structural reforms did not result in a major discontinuity with the past rather path dependency forces have acted as a major factor explaining differential performance among industries after recent changes in the global incentive regime

a dynamic program for valuing corporate securities abstract we design and implement a dynamic program for valuing corporate securities seen as derivatives on a firm s assets and computing the term structure of yield spreads and default probabilities our setting is flexible for it accommodates an extended balance sheet equality arbitrary corporate debts multiple seniority classes and a reorganization process this flexibility comes at the expense of a minor loss of efficiency the analytical approach proposed in the literature is exchanged here for a quasi analytical approach based on dynamic programming coupled with finite elements to assess our construction which shows flexibility and efficiency we carry out a numerical investigation along with a complete sensitivity analysis

bargaining unit composition and the returns to education and tenure using data on collectively bargained outcomes in pennsylvania schools in 1983 89 the authors find a strong relationship between the returns to education and tenure and the distribution of those attributes in the bargaining unit for instance the higher the median level of teacher tenure in a district the greater was the pay gap between teachers with low and high tenure this relationship was very strong in districts with vigorous community support for union activities and weak or nonexistent in districts with low union support the authors argue that consistent with the median voter model the unions in this study pushed hardest to advance the interests of their typical members and that they were most effective in doing so where the community was generally supportive of unions

an empirical investigation of u s firms in reorganization the purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of chapter 11 from an empirical examination of thirty firms that have emerged from reorganization we find the recontracting framework of chapter 11 to be complex lengthy and costly violations of absolute priority in favor of stockholders are frequently encountered these deviations may result from the bargaining process of chapter 11 or from a recontracting process between creditors and stockholders which recognizes the ability of stockholder oriented management to preserve firm value an example of such recontracting addresses myers underinvestment problem an investigation of the effects of chapter 11 on the pricing of risky debt is also provided the purpose of this paper is to understand the institutional features of chapter

inter firm network policies and firm performance evaluating the impact of initiatives in the united kingdom abstract this paper explores the strengths and weaknesses of inter firm networks as a public policy resource that has necessarily required experimentation and adaptation the focus of the paper is an evaluation of public policy network initiatives in the united kingdom from the point of view of the companies participating in these initiatives the study finds that inter firm network initiatives have faced a number of problems resulting in the level of inter firm interaction being generally fairly low and unintensive this has severely limited the number of firms that have benefited from participation as well as the overall impact on firm performance and growth more positively it is shown that the initiatives have resulted in substantial gains for albeit a small number of participating companies the small number of companies achieving substantial benefits were most often those involved in initiatives that were able to formalise sustainable networks the key policy problem is that this situation has occurred in only a very restricted number of circumstances with formal network initiatives being subject to extremely high drop out rates it is suggested that policies aimed at formal network initiatives should be abandoned as a mechanism for creating a critical mass of sustainable networks instead the progression of policy models based on informal initiatives appears to offer the most plausible means of catalysing inter company contact

when will fossil fuel reserves be diminished crude oil coal and gas are the main resources for world energy supply the size of fossil fuel reserves and the dilemma that when non renewable energy will be diminished is a fundamental and doubtful question that needs to be answered this paper presents a new formula for calculating when fossil fuel reserves are likely to be depleted and develops an econometrics model to demonstrate the relationship between fossil fuel reserves and some main variables the new formula is modified from the klass model and thus assumes a continuous compound rate and computes fossil fuel reserve depletion times for oil coal and gas of approximately 35 107 and 37 years respectively this means that coal reserves are available up to 2112 and will be the only fossil fuel remaining after 2042 in the econometrics model the main exogenous variables affecting oil coal and gas reserve trends are their consumption and respective prices between 1980 and 2006 the models for oil and gas reserves unexpectedly show a positive and significant relationship with consumption while presenting a negative and significant relationship with price the econometrics model for coal reserves however expectedly illustrates a negative and significant relationship with consumption and a positive and significant relationship with price consequently huge reserves of coal and low level coal prices in comparison to oil and gas make coal one of the main energy substitutions for oil and gas in the future under the assumption of coal as a clean energy source

who s afraid of atmospheric stabilisation making the link between energy resources and climate change abstract the distribution of fossil fuel reserves and resources between different regions and deposits has strong implications for climate change economics and policy the task of stabilising the atmosphere is intimately linked to the question of long term energy supplies as conventional petroleum reserves deplete notwithstanding debates about the scope for reserve extension through continued exploration and development it suggests a supply side component to complement the consumption orientation of existing climate policies the task is to ensure that investment and innovation moves towards the low carbon frontier instead of the high carbon frontier this also implies that the opec countries have little to fear about the long run impact of climate change policy the priority is to deter development of more carbon intensive unconventional petroleum deposits and technologies and to ensure that the existing trends to diversify power generation sources continue and extend more widely over time supply side constraints will not solve the climate problem in themselves but they make the task a lot easier if the opportunities are taken

opportunities incentives and the collective patterns of technological change in a few pages in the introductory article for this debate vernon ruttan succeeds in the unlikely task of flagging many issues at the core of the economic interpretation of technological change and by doing so he implicitly addresses also a few sensitive spots for the economic discipline at large here i will not attempt to provide any thorough view of what i consider the achievements and limitations of the current state of the art see however freeman i 994 for a critical survey which i largely share rather i shall put forward a series of remarks which hopefully could be seen as part of a much wider and still largely unexplored research programme as a premise just note that some form of attention to technology related phenomena has spread over the last 20 30 years from small enclaves of heterodox economists and economic historians to become an important concern even for quite mainstream theories of e g the firm industrial organisation macroeconomics trade growth etc from patent races all the way to new trade and new growth theories and even real business cycle macro models technical change has drawn a consideration which is less by default than it was say in robert solow s original growth models orjoe bain s barriers to entry views on industrial structures and in parallel empirical studies at the levels of specific technologies firms sectors and countries have boomed for overviews cf dosi i988 nelson i993 freeman i982 i 994 cohen i 995 and granstrand i 994 among others so at least in this sense those decreasing returns to the economics of technical change suggested by ruttan do not seem to have set in however ruttan s paper raises also substantive questions about the relative success of three interpretative perspectives which he calls induced evolutionary and path dependent in the following i shall argue that an evolutionary perspective broadly defined can easily accommodate both inducement effects and path dependent patterns of technical change let me start from what i consider the major building blocks of an

major oil exporters may profit rather than lose in a carbon constrained world the organization of petroleum exporting countries opec claims compensation for losses in expected oil export revenues due to co2 mitigation measures in developing countries these losses are expected for two primary reasons a reduction in the consumption of oil in importing countries and a reduction in the producer price of oil taxation in an importing country implies a transfer of rents from producers to consumers so far most studies have focused on these two mechanisms and corroborated that revenue losses for opec are to be expected however there are also mechanisms that may be expected to raise the price of oil products in a cost effective regime for dealing with climate change i e a regime in which all or most countries participate and in which the same carbon price is applied on all carbon emitting activities the cost of using unconventional oil or synthetic diesel from coal will increase even more than the cost of using conventional oil given that reserves of conventional oil are expected to dwindle over time heavy oils and coal to liquids might set the long run price for liquid fuels which means that the price of oil would increase beyond the carbon fee i e the rent on conventional oil would increase we use an energy economic optimization model to analyze these three mechanisms we find that the net present value of opec revenue from conventional oil increases slightly at most by 4 percent with a global co2 restriction regime we also consider conditions under which this result does not hold

the supply of child care labor this article presents estimates of the elasticity of supply of labor to child care this parameter is an important determinant of the effects of child care subsidies and regulations on the cost of child care using data from the current population survey there is evidence of an elasticity in the range of 1 2 1 9 this implies that the majority of the benefits of child care subsidies accrue to consumers of child care it is also consistent with the fact that child care workers wages remained flat in real terms in recent years despite rapid growth in the demand for child care

the diffusion of innovations in protected industries the textile industry the diffusion of the shuttleless loom a major innovation in the textile industry has been relatively slow in spite of the undisputed improvement with respect to the conventional shuttle loom used for weaving textiles the diffusion of shuttleless looms in industrialized countries is analysed in the framework of an epidemic diffusion model where the diffusion speed parameter is allowed to vary of the various factors affecting the speed of diffusion trade liberalization seems to have the most potent impact in accelerating diffusion this finding is consistent with the idea that trade liberalization is conducive to speeding up the diffusion of innovations

continuous time methods in finance a review and an assessment i survey and assess the development of continuous time methods in finance during the last 30 years the subperiod 1969 to 1980 saw a dizzying pace of development with seminal ideas in derivatives securities pricing term structure theory asset pricing and optimal consumption and portfolio choices during the period 1981 to 1999 the theory has been extended and modified to better explain empirical regularities in various subfields of finance this latter subperiod has seen significant progress in econometric theory computational and estimation methods to test and implement continuous time models capital market frictions and bargaining issues are being increasingly incorporated in continuous time theory the roots of modern continuous time methods in finance can be traced back to the seminal contributions of merton 1969 1971 1973b in the late 1960s and early 1970s merton 1969 pioneered the use of continuous time modeling in financial economics by formulating the intertemporal consumption and portfolio choice problem of an investor in a stochastic dynamic programming setting merton 1973b also showed how such a framework can be used to develop equilibrium asset pricing implications thereby significantly extending the asset pricing theory to richer dynamic settings and expanding the scope of applications of continuous time methods to study problems in financial economics 1 within a span of about 30 years from the publication of merton s inf luential papers continuous time methods have become an integral part of financial economics indeed in certain core areas in finance such as e g asset pricing derivatives valuation term structure theory and portfolio selection continuoustime methods have proved to be the most attractive way to conduct research and gain economic intuition the continuous time approach in these areas has produced models with a rich variety of testable implications the econometric theory for testing continuous time models has made rapid strides in the last decade and has thus kept pace with the impressive progress on the theoretical front one hopes that the actual empirical investigations and estimation using the new procedures will follow suit soon

on the nature of technologies knowledge procedures artifacts and production inputs in the most general terms a technology can be seen as a human constructed means for achieving a particular end such as the movement of goods and people the transmission of information or the cure of a disease these means most often entail procedures regarding how to achieve the ends concerned particular bits of knowledge artifacts and of course specific physical inputs necessary to yield the desired outcomes in fact the procedures and the underlying knowledge they draw upon the physical and intangible inputs implicated and the performance characteristics of outputs are different but complementary aspects of what technology is these things are the object of this short essay copyright the author 2009 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

institutional barriers to associative city region governance the politics of institution building and economic governance in canada s technology triangle it has been argued that collaborative and associative forms of governance can enhance the economic competitiveness of cities and regions institutionalist approaches to urban and regional economic

financial innovation in the uk this study employs a national survey of over 1100 british financial firms to ascertain the determinants of financial innovation and their sales success using the logit and the generalized tobit models we find that the likelihood of financial innovation rises with the size of financial firms employee education greater expenditure on research and development the availability of finance and the extent to which firms cooperate with each other perceptions of economic risk and innovation costs are also influential r d cooperation and human capital are the main variables driving the success of financial innovation measured by the percentage share of innovations sold firms in london the south have a significantly greater tendency to innovate though scotland also does well stock broking fund management and related activities are more innovative than firms in the financial intermediation and pension insurance sectors

continental national and sub national innovation systems complementarity and economic growth the purpose of this paper is to discuss the relevance of innovation systems to economic growth rates over the last two centuries the focus is on complementarity or lack of it between sub systems of society and on models of active learning in catching up economies the paper discusses variations in rates of growth of economic regions and the extent to which variations may be attributed to innovation systems the analysis is applied to britain in the 18th century the united states in the second half of the 19th century and the innovation systems of catching up countries in the 20th century

unobserved systematic risk factor and default prediction abstract we conduct a thorough analysis on the role played by the unobserved systematic risk factor in default prediction we find that this latent factor outweighs the observed systematic risk factors and can substantially improve the in sample predictive accuracy at the firm rating group and aggregate levels thus it might be helpful to include the unobserved systematic risk factor when simulating portfolio credit losses however we also find that this factor only marginally improves out of sample model performance therefore although the models we investigated all show reasonably good ability to rank order firms by default risk accurate prediction of default rate remains challenging even when the unobserved systematic risk factor is considered

do small innovating firms outperform non innovators the paper considers the relative performance along a number of parameters of a sample of 228 small manufacturing firms categorised by level of innovation whilst innovators appear no more likely to have experienced some form of sales or employment growth they are significantly more likely to have grown more in other words the innovators growth rate distributions are highly negatively skewed with regards to export intensities profitability and productivity levels the findings are less clear on the whole the results reported here are similar to those of other small firm studies yet vary markedly from large firm equivalents suggesting that the nature of the returns to innovation may be contingent at least in part upon firm size moreover the high levels of variation in firm performance should caution us against proffering innovative imperatives if we are to counsel firms to innovate at all costs we must be clear about and clearly demonstrate the nature of the returns they may reasonably expect and the processes through which these may be optimised

identifying the effect of open access on citations using a panel of science journals an open access journal allows free online access to its articles obtaining revenue from fees charged to submitting authors or from institutional support using panel data on science journals we are able to circumvent problems plaguing previous studies of the impact of open access on citations in contrast to the huge effects found in these previous studies we find a more modest effect moving from paid to open access increases cites by 8 on average in our sample the benefit is concentrated among top ranked journals in fact open access causes a statistically significant reduction in cites to the bottom ranked journals in our sample leading us to conjecture that open access may intensify competition among articles for readers attention generating losers as well as winners jel l17 o33

environmental rebounds backfires macroeconomic implications for the promotion of environmentally friendly products abstract this paper develops a dynamic two good clean and dirty goods two sector model to explore the implications of the macroeconomic environmental rebound backfire effect for environmentally friendly product promotions on not only the demand side a subsidy on the clean good consumption but also the supply side a technology promotion in the clean good production the macroeconomic environmental rebound backfire is decomposed into three effects the substitution wealth and sectoral reallocation effects we show that the steady state pollution stock exhibits a u shaped relationship with either demand side or supply side green promotions our calibrated result indicates that in terms of pollution the macroeconomic rebound effectfor the economy as a whole appears to be substantial more pronounced rebound effects are present when the elasticity of substitution between the clean and dirty good consumption is lower the labor supply is more elastic the environmental efficiency of clean goods is lower and the technology level in the clean good production is higher we also show that a pollution rebound can result in a social welfare improvement implying that the rebound effect somewhat improves economic efficiency and so policies aimed at mitigating the rebound effect may be counterproductive from a welfare perspective

macroanalysis of the economic and environmental impacts of a 2005 2025 european union bioenergy policy using the gtap model and life cycle assessment abstract this paper describes a new tool to assess the medium and long term economic and environmental impacts of large scale policies the approach macro life cycle assessment m lca is based on life cycle assessment methodology and includes additional elements to model economic externalities and the temporal evolution of background parameters the general equilibrium model gtap was therefore used to simulate the economic consequences of policies in a dynamic framework representing the temporal evolution of macroeconomic and technological parameters environmental impacts expressed via four indicators human health ecosystems global warming and natural resources are computed according to policy life cycle and its indirect economic consequences in order to illustrate the approach two 2005 2025 european union eu energy policies were compared using m lca the first policy the bioenergy policy aims to significantly increase energy generation from biomass and reduce eu energy demand for coal the second policy the baseline policy is a business as usual policy where year 2000 energy policies are extended to 2025 results show that compared to the baseline policy the bioenergy policy generates fewer impacts on three of the four environmental indicators human health global warming and natural resources at the world and eu scales though the results may differ significantly at a regional level the results also highlight the key contribution of economic growth to the total environmental impacts computed for the 2005 2025 period a comparison of the results with a more conventional consequential lca approach illustrates the benefits of m lca when modeling the indirect environmental impacts of large scale policies the sensitivity and uncertainty analysis indicates that the method is quite robust however its robustness must still be evaluated based on the sensitivity and uncertainty of additional parameters including the evolution of economic growth

dealing with environmental savings in a dynamical economy how to stop chasing your tail in the pursuit of sustainability abstract in most countries people are urged to change their pattern of consumption and lifestyle in a less energy consuming and more environmental friendly direction but gains in ecoefficiency are likely to be annihilated by a larger consumption the so called rebound effect resulting in an increased throughput in the economy here is an obvious contradiction another contradiction entails from the fact that most governments strive to promote economic growth which includes increased consumption the paper takes a look at various means to handle these contradictions in order to avoid or balance the rebound effect environmental policies including such measures as green taxes may redirect consumption from one kind to another but this demands that the alternative spending is less harmful than the one dissuaded from two other tested means are to alter the sector mix of the economy and to shorten the working hours work sharing to match the increasing efficiency

the impact of classes of innovators on technology financial fragility and economic growth in this article we study innovation processes and technological change in an agent based model by including a behavioral switching among heterogeneous innovative firms the model is able to replicate via simulations well known industrial dynamic and growth type stylized facts the main original element of the model is that firms are allowed to endogenously change among three different classes namely single innovators collaborative innovators and imitators moreover our analysis focuses on the impact of these three innovation categories on micro meso and macro aggregates we find that collaborative companies are those having the highest positive impact on the economic system furthermore we have paid particular attention to the role of credit market in promoting smart growth for this purpose we analyze the role of banks as sources of external funds for innovative entrepreneurs our results suggest a trade off between short term profit maximization and long term efficiency which prevents banks to foster investment in r d and technological progress the model is then used to study the effect that different innovation policies have on macroeconomic performance

unions and the economy what we know what we should know the wages and working conditions of about one in three canadian workers are determined by collective bargaining in this paper current knowledge about the economic effects of collective bargaining is surveyed unions raise wages by about 15 percent on average and reduce wage dispersion for their members while also reducing profits unions do not seem to reduce employment levels in affected firms or cause nonunion wages to fall efficiency losses due to sectoral misallocation of labor and to strikes are small but some evidence suggests lowered investment in unionized firms union effects on total factor productivity need more careful study using firm level data

excessive continuation and dynamic agency costs of debt abstract this paper analyses the incentives of the equityholders of a leveraged company to shut it down in a continuous time stochastic environment keeping the firm as an ongoing concern has an option value but equity and debt holders value it differently equityholders decisions exhibit excessive continuation and reduce firm s value using a compound exchange option approach we characterise the resulting agency costs of debt derive the price of these costs and analyse their dynamics we also show how agency costs can be reduced by the design of debt

union effects in low wage services evidence from canadian childcare empirical evidence presented in this paper based on survey data for canadian childcare workers in 1991 contradicts most stereotypes of the childcare labor market although childcare labor was low wage the authors find that the union impact on wages 15 and fringe benefits was in line with union effects found in other better compensated work and they find substantial returns to education occupational level and firm specific experience the returns to the skill related attributes were blunted somewhat in the union sector except where such returns stood to benefit the median union voter the findings suggest that monetary incentives can be used to encourage improvements in the education experience and skill acquisition of childcare workers unions can improve wages and benefits for childcare workers just as they can for most other workers suggesting the viability of union organizing in this sector despite the traditional barriers to organizing low wage service sector workers in small firms u nion organizing in the growing lowwage female dominated service sector is often regarded as key to offsetting the decline in union membership that is occurring in the areas of traditional union strength the recent success of the service

scope and patterns of innovation cooperation in spanish service enterprises abstract examining 2148 innovating service firms from the spanish technological innovation panel 2004 this paper utilizes latent class analysis to appraise the scope of innovation cooperation in services in the spanish economy in accordance with the growing weight of external information flows throughout innovation processes the empirical evidence indicates that the nature of the service activity affects both the partner chosen and the cooperation intensity the results lead to the creation of a typology of cooperation composed of three broad profiles service firms intensive in techno scientific cooperation intensive in interactions with clients and a profile with low intensity in cooperation called lonely innovators the probability that a firm belongs to the latter profile is 59 which makes it reasonable to affirm that innovation cooperation is not a common practice in spanish innovating service enterprises innovation output variables have been included in order to examine the relationship between patterns of cooperation and innovation performance the findings also underline the co existence of different cooperation patterns within the same industry

strategic analysis of contingent claims traditional contingent claims analysis provides an elegant and complete model of the financing of the dynamic firm but has difficulty fitting the observations in the market recent work in corporate finance suggests this is because of its failure to model financial distress realistically we survey recent efforts to address this issue by deriving valuation formulae from the analysis of non cooperative equilibria in extensive form games we illustrate how a simple static bankruptcy model can be incorporated in a dynamic game we then show how to find the continuous time equivalent of this game this we use to find closed form bond formulae in special cases and to exploit efficient numerical techniques generally

opportunistic underinvestment in debt renegotiation and capital structure abstract this paper models debt renegotiation as a bargaining game between debtholders and shareholder oriented management in which management credibly threatens to run down firm assets to force concessions from the creditors creditors anticipate this opportunistic behavior by management creating an upper bound on debt capacity that is less than the value of the firm if an advantage to debt is introduced such as favorable tax treatment an interior optimal capital structure obtains even in the absence of realized bankruptcy costs our model also explains variations in debt equity ratios and the use of certain puzzling debt covenants

the sufficiency strategy would rich world frugality lower environmental impact abstract one alleged weapon against unsustainable environmental impact is for the wealthy to consume less this sufficiency strategy is to complement the efficiency strategy of lowering ratios of resource inputs to economic outputs the former would reduce the affluence factor in i pat the latter the technology factor that the latter strategy suffers from a consumption rebound is widely recognized this paper identifies a similar rebound when the affluence factor is autonomously lowered the lower initial demand lowers prices which in turn stimulates new demand by others the strategy moreover addresses only the rich raising questions of its theoretical maximum efficacy its proponents usually conflate frugality with the north south dichotomy and intra generational with inter generational equity moreover there are difficulties with the supporting arguments that frugality is good for one s own sake as well as for the environment and that the rich should lead the way to living more lightly personal behaviour change is furthermore not a substitute for international political efforts finally since all changes in right side factors of the i pat equation change other right side factors such indirect attacks on impact should be abandoned in favor of supply and emissions quotas

happy degrowth through more amateur economy abstract this paper outlines a simple aggregate descriptive model of what is here termed a whole economy covering all human involvement in the economy from ultimate means or ecological sacrifices to the ultimate ends of human satisfaction the model embraces not only the formal professional economy driven by money but also the parallel non paid voluntary economy here termed amateur economy driven by peoples affective motivations the input of work to the economy plays an essential role in the paper s analysis of options for reducing ecological sacrifices hence part of the paper is devoted to a brief historical overview of the role of work including turning points in the 1930s in the united states when work sharing was displaced by work creation through consumerism and in the post war economy when gdp became the dominant economic indicator the paper proposes the aim of a happy and sustainable degrowth for affluent countries implying the transfer of some activities from the professional economy to the less labor productive amateur economy this will tend to reduce overall labor productivity and hence resource throughput but increase satisfaction and happiness a key element in the analysis is combining a reduction in consumption with a reduction in production which is obtainable through lowering either working time or work productivity and turning some of the leisure time into voluntary activities economic growth is not a law of nature but the consequence of explicit political decisions taken hence growth is also open to new political decisions in recognition of physical limits to growth and the human quest for replacing economic growth with life satisfaction including increased free time

does online availability increase citations theory and evidence from a panel of economics and business journals abstract does online availability boost citations using a panel of citations to economics and business journals we show that the enormous effects found in previous studies were an artifact of their failure to control for article quality disappearing once fixed effects are added as controls the absence of aggregate effects masks heterogeneity across platforms jstor has a uniquely large effect boosting citations around 10 we examine other sources of heterogeneity including whether jstor disproportionately increases cites from developing countries or to long tail articles our theoretical analysis informs the econometric specification and allows citation increases to be translated into welfare terms

innovation in firms as the firm is the central mechanism for converting innovation into economic action this paper argues that economists and economic policy makers need to understand how and why firms innovate this is challenging because innovation manifests itself in a wide range of forms and results from diverse organizational processes the paper discusses a number of the practices supporting innovation in firms including positioning connecting protecting organizing and measuring a number of theories explaining innovation in firms are discussed the paper concludes that the determination of the most effective policy levers for encouraging innovation requires staying abreast of current and emerging innovation practices in firms

technological revolutions and techno economic paradigms this paper locates the notion of technological revolutions in the neo schumpeterian effort to understand innovation and to identify the regularities continuities and discontinuities in the process of innovation it looks at the micro and meso foundations of the patterns observed in the evolution of technical change and at the interrelations with the context that shape the rhythm and direction of innovation on this basis it defines technological revolutions examines their structure and the role that they play in rejuvenating the whole economy through the application of the accompanying techno economic paradigm this over arching meta paradigm or shared best practice common sense is in turn defined and analysed in its components and its impact including its influence on institutional and social change

cash flow shortage as an endogenous bankruptcy reason abstract this paper develops a simple model for a leveraged firm and endogenizes the firm s bankruptcy point by assuming that equity issuance is costly equity issuance costs reflect the difficulties in issuing new equity for firms that are close to financial distress the resulting model captures cash flow shortage as a reason to go bankrupt though the equity value is positive i analyze the optimal bankruptcy point as well as corporate bond prices and yield spreads for various levels of equity issuance costs in order to study the impact of different liquidity constraints finally i discuss the consequences on optimal capital structure

a critical assessment of the evaluation of eu interventions for innovation in the sme sector in wales in this paper the eu structural fund intervention framework is critically assessed in an effort to reflect on the problems faced by policy makers when trying to make sense of the complexity associ

effects of property rights on labor costs of nonprofit firms an application to the day care industry this paper estimates differences in labor costs between nonprofit and for profit firms in the day care industry a theoretical model which draws on the property rights literature as well as recent theo ries of nonprofit labor markets predicts that the magnitude and sign of the nonprofit salary differential will depend on specific characteristics of the samples analyzed empirical results reveal that in th e most competitive segment of the day care industry the nonprofit salary differential is insignificant however in the less competitive government subsidized segment of the industry the nonprofit different ial is significantly positive it ranges from 5 percent to 10 percent copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

the national system of innovation in historical perspective contrary to some recent work on so called globalisation this paper argues that national and regional systems of innovation remain an essential domain of economic analysis their importance derives from the networks of relationships which are necessary for any firm to innovate whilst external international connections are certainly of growing importance the influence of the national education system industrial relations technical and scientific institutions government policies cul tural traditions and many other national institutions is fundamental the historical examples of germany japan and the former ussr illustrate this point as well as the more recent contrast between east asian and latin american countries introduction the national system of friedrich list according to this author s recollections the first person to use the expression national system of innovation was bengt ake lundvall and he is also the editor of a highly original and thought provoking book 1992 on this subject however as he and his colleagues would be the first to agree and as lundvall himself points out the idea actually goes back at least to friedrich list s conception of the national system of political economy 1841 which might just as well have been called the national system of innovation the main concern of list was with the problem of germany overtaking england and for underdeveloped countries as germany then was in relation to england he advocated not only protection of infant industries but a broad range of policies designed to accelerate or to make possible industrialisation and economic growth most of these policies were concerned with learning about new technology and applying it the racialist and colonialist overtones of the book were in strong contrast to the inter nationalist cosmopolitan approach of the classical free trade economists and list s belief that holland and denmark should join the german bund and acquire german nationality because of their descent and whole character reads somewhat strangely in the european community of today nevertheless despite these unattractive features of his outlook he clearly anticipated many contemporary theories after reviewing the changing ideas of economists about development in the years since the second world war the world bank 1991 concludes that it is intangible investment in knowledge accumulation which is decisive rather than physical capital investment as was at one time believed pages 33 35 the report cites the new growth theory

debt valuation renegotiation and optimal dividend policy the valuation of debt and equity reorganization boundaries and firm s optimal dividend policies are studied in a framework where we model strategic interactions between debt holders and equity holders in a game theoretic setting which can accommodate varying bargaining powers to the two claimants two formulations of reorganization are presented debt equity swaps and strategic debt service resulting from negotiated debt service reductions we study the effects of bond covenants on payout policies and distinguish liquidity induced defaults from strategic defaults we derive optimal equity issuance and payout policies the debt capacity of the firm and the optimal capital structure are characterized

a binomial lattice method for pricing corporate debt and modeling chapter 11 proceedings the pricing of corporate debt is still a challenging and active research area in corporate finance starting with merton 1974 many authors proposed a structural approach in which the value of the assets of the firm is modeled by a stochastic process and all other variables are derived from this basic process these structural models have become more complex over time in order to capture more realistic aspects of bankruptcy proceedings the literature in this area emphasizes closed form solutions that are derived by either partial differential equation methods or analytical pricing techniques however it is not always possible to build a comprehensive model with realistic model features and achieve a closed form solution at the same time in this paper we develop a binomial lattice method that can be used to handle complex structural models such as ones that include chapter 11 proceedings of the u s bankruptcy code although lattice methods have been widely used in the option pricing literature they are relatively new in corporate debt pricing in particular the limited liability requirement of the equity holders needs to be handled carefully in this context our method can be used to solve the leland 1994 model and its extension to the finite maturity case the more complex model of broadie chernov and sundaresan 2005 and others

child care costs and the employment decision of women canadian evidence the authors estimate the joint decision for women with preschool children to engage in paid employment and to purchase market forms of child care the results confirm those found in most u s studies indicating that child care costs exert a significant negative effect on the labor supply of women with children and on their decision to purchase child care as well the expected wage of the mother exerts a significant positive impact on both the decision to purchase market forms of child care and the decision to engage in paid unemployment

positive and negative feedback in consequential life cycle assessment abstract in this paper we develop a typology of consequences that can be used for environmental assessments of investment in technologies as an illustration we estimate how the inclusion of different cause effect chains could affect the estimated greenhouse gas emissions resulting from buying and using a fuel cell bus today in contrast to earlier studies we include cause effect chains containing positive feedback from adoption e g economies of scale and learning we discuss how our findings affect the usefulness and limitations of consequential life cycle assessment lca and how lca methodology in more general can be used to support strategic technology choice a major conclusion is that environmental assessments of investment in emerging technologies should not only include effects resulting from marginal change of the current system but also marginal contributions to radical system change

collective invention during the british industrial revolution the case of the cornish pumping engine in this paper we argue that together with individual inventors and firms what robert c allen 1983 has termed as collective invention settings that is settings in which rival firms freely release each other pertinent technical information were also a crucial source of innovation in the industrial revolution period until now this has been very little considered in the literature this paper focuses on one of these cases the cornish mining district in cornwall during the early nineteenth century a notable collective invention setting gradually emerged this case is particularly remarkable because it was capable of generating a continuous and sustained flow of improvements in steam pumping technology which in the end greatly contributed to improve the thermodynamic efficiency of the steam engine in this paper we study in detail the specific economic circumstances that led to the formation of this collective invention setting and we analyses its consequences for the rate of technological innovation

resolution of financial distress under chapter 11 abstract we develop a contingent claims model for a firm in financial distress with a formal account for renegotiations under the u s bankruptcy procedure known as chapter 11 shareholders and two classes of creditors senior and junior alternatively propose a reorganization plan subject to a vote the bankruptcy judge can intervene in any renegotiation round to impose a plan the multiple stage bargaining process is solved in a non cooperative game theory setting the calibrated model yields the liquidation rate the duration of chapter 11 and the frequency of deviations from the absolute priority rule which are consistent with empirical evidence

effective climate energy solutions escape routes and peak oil abstract many well intended climate energy strategies are ineffective in the absence of serious environmental regulation this holds among others for direct support of clean energy voluntary energy conservation technical standards on a limited set of products unilateral stringent carbon pricing and awaiting peak oil as a climate strategy all of these suffer from escape routes that indirectly increase co2 emissions and thus make the original strategy ineffective on the other hand environmental regulation alone may lead to a myopia bias stimulating early dominance of cost effective technologies and a focus on incremental innovations associated with such technologies rather than on radical innovations although adopting a partial viewpoint keeps the analysis simple we urgently need a more inclusive systems perspective on climate solutions this will allow the formulation of an effective climate policy package that addresses the various escape routes

dividends and leverage how to optimally exploit a non renewable investment in this paper we model the situation where a non renewable investment is given for instance a resource reservoir and show how to optimally trade off between dividends and leverage in order to maximize a performance indicator for shareholders up to the bankruptcy time we then study the way market risk the volatility of the market price of the resource impacts the optimal policies and the default risk of the company the moments when the policies are rebalanced are analyzed and we give a measure of the agency costs which appear between the shareholders and the debt holders

transposing lessons between different forms of consequential greenhouse gas accounting lessons for consequential life cycle assessment project level accounting and policy level accounting abstract greenhouse gas accounting has developed in a number of semi isolated fields of practice and there appears to be considerable opportunity for transposing methodological innovations and lessons between these different fields this research paper identifies three consequential forms of greenhouse gas accounting consequential life cycle assessment project level accounting and policy level accounting these methods are described in detail and then compared in order to identify the key methodological differences and the potential lessons that can be transposed between them analysis of the substantive methodological differences suggests that consequential life cycle assessment could be enhanced by adopting the same structure used in project and policy level accounting which provides a time series of impacts aggregate level analysis and a transparent specification of the baseline and decision scenarios there is a case for conceptualising a unified form of consequential time series assessment of which project policy and product assessments would be sub types

information appropriability and the generation of innovative knowledge four decades after arrow and nelson an introduction this introduction sets in context the works that follow which are meant to take stock of the theoretical advances and also historical changes since the seminal arrow 1962 and nelson 1959 first we summarize some of the original arrow nelson insights second we map the subsequent developments shorthanded as the stanford yale sussex synthesis a particularly controversial issue concerns the relationships between notional opportunities of innovation private appropriability of return from innovating and realized rates of innovation hence third we briefly offer a framework for its discussion in general and with reference to the private appropriation of scientific knowledge copyright 2006 oxford university press

is unionization compatible with professionalism this study examines over 100 collective bargaining agreements covering a wide range of professions and organizations to assess the continuing fundamental debate over the compatibility of unionization with professionalism the author finds that some contractual provisions affecting professional standards participation in organizational decision making and other issues of professional concern support traditional professional values and some do not this mixed evidence challenges claims that unionization necessarily involves the rejection of professionalism

a time use perspective on the materials intensity of consumption abstract the ecological requirements to drastically increase the productivity of materials use call for improvements in the efficiency of consumption this eco efficiency discussion often takes a functional view on consumption noting that present consumption is inefficient and that it is not the products that the consumers want but the services that the products yield however contemporary consumption serves many needs that are not functional and universal but subjective and obscured from the producers this paper develops a time use approach towards consumption which makes allowance for the subjectivity of needs while still enabling the analysts to approach the concept of a sustainable lifestyle a distinctive premise of the analysis is that it assumes time and money not to be interchangeable and consumption to be limited by available consumption time instead of purchasing power this approach is demonstrated by linking the direct and the indirect energy use of finnish two person households to the data of a national time use survey the results are used to point out some of the potential time use rebound effects of such new eco efficient services that transfer activities from private households to the market actors

will opec lose from the kyoto protocol a range of energy economy models forecast losses to members of the organisation of petroleum exporting countries opec should the kyoto protocol come into force these forecasts are a powerful influence in the united nations framework convention on climate change negotiations they are used by opec to advance the agenda on the impacts of response measures covertly arguing for compensation for lost oil revenues arising from implementation of the protocol this paper discusses this issue and explores the key assumptions of these models and their uncertainties assumptions about carbon leakage future availability of oil reserves substitution innovation and capital turnover are considered the paper suggests that losses will not affect opec countries equally and that these losses are not likely to be as substantial as the models forecast a range of policy measures are proposed to lessen any impact the protocol may have on opec

the role of union strategies in nlrb certification elections analyzing 1986 87 data from 261 nlrb certification election campaigns the author finds that union tactic variables explain more of the variance in election outcomes than any other group of variabl

the economics of technical change this paper reviews the recent rapidly growing literature on technical change in the economy it concentrates on innovations and their diffusion at firm and industry level since this was the area designated as relatively weak in earlier literature surveys the review argues that the extensive empirical evidence and theoretical analysis now available presents a basic challenge to neoclassical theory after indicating some weaknesses in the neo schumpeterian literature the paper concludes by advocating an experiment with a new form of assessment by neighboring disciplines to economics itself which would take full account of the fundamental issues at stake in this modern methodenstreit c 1994 academic press inc copyright 1994 by oxford university press

dynamics of energy technologies and global change technological choices largely determine the long term characteristics of industrial society including impacts on the natural environment however the treatment of technology in existing models that are used to project economic and environmental futures remains highly stylized based on work over two decades at iiasa we present a useful typology for technology analysis and discuss methods that can be used to analyze the impact of technological changes on the global environment especially global warming our focus is energy technologies the main source of many atmospheric environmental problems we show that much improved treatment of technology is possible with a combination of historical analysis and new modeling techniques in the historical record we identify characteristic l such network e ects yield high barriers to entry even for superior competitors these simple observations allow three improvements to modeling of technological change and its consequences for global environmental change one is that the replacement of long lived infrastructures over time has also replaced the fuels that power the economy to yield progressively more energy per unit of carbon pollution from coal to oil to gas such replacement has d they also include endogenous generation of s we show that doing so can yield projections with lessened environmental impacts without necessarily incurring negative e ect on the economy arriving on that path by the year 2100 depends on intervening actions such as incentives to promote greater diversity in technology and lower barriers to entry for new infrastructures that could accelerate historical trends of decarbonization 1999 elsevier science ltd all rights reserved

r versus d estimating the differentiated effect of research and development on innovation results r d is considered to be the main source of innovation we argue that r d is too broad a measure including activities differing in purposes culture people management and other features however empirical studies have not analyzed them separately mainly due to the lack of data using firm level data the aim of this paper is to estimate the differentiated effect of research and development on different innovation outputs results show that both research and development activities are important however we find that development activities are more important for product innovation while the effect of research activities is higher on process innovation moreover we analyze differences by technological intensity of the sector when analyzing product and process innovations we find evidence supporting the existence of higher payoffs to development and especially to research in low tech sectors when compared with high tech ones

technical change growth and trade new departures in institutional economics this article analyses the main theoretical and policy issues emerging from the literature on the evolutionary institutional economics of technical change the four distinguishing characteristics of which are that technology is often proprietary in nature only a part of knowledge is codifiable in handbooks blueprints patents and so on there are fundamental variations in the above two points across different technological fields and the evolution of knowledge is highly path dependent