measuring the spillovers from technical advance mainframe computers in financial services measuring the social gains from recent technological advances is difficult because there are no output indexes from some important adopters measurement methods that infer the willingness to pay of theadopting industries from the derived demand curve for a new technologyovercome this difficulty the derived demand for high speed computersfor use in banks finance and insurance is shown to imply a very largesocial gain to computerization that is not captured by computer manufacturers copyright 1986 by american economic association

public research and industrial innovations in germany this paper deals with the effects of publicly funded research at universities polytechnics and federal research labs on industrial innovations in germany we discuss the characteristics of companies that benefit from the findings of public research institutions in questioning 2 300 companies we found that less than one tenth of product or process innovating firms introduced innovations between 1993 and 1995 that would not have been developed without public research these new products amount to approximately 5 percent of all new product sales regressions show that firms own r d support the ability to absorb the findings of public research and turn them into innovations contrary to the widely held opinion that proximity to public research institutions does promote collaboration between firms and public research and increase the amount of received knowledge spillovers we found no higher probability of publicly supported innovations for firms in germany that are located near universities or polytechnics

wages sorting on skill and the racial composition of jobs wages for black and white workers are substantially lower in occupations with a high density of black employees following standard controls such correlations can exist absent discrimination or as a result of discrimination in wage level equations partial correlations fall sharply after controlling for occupational skills longitudinal estimates accounting for worker heterogeneity indicate little wage change associated with changes in racial composition results support a quality sorting rather than discrimination explanation with racial density serving as an index of unmeasured skills discrimination reflected in racial wage gaps occurs within occupations or across occupations in a manner uncorrelated with racial composition

licensing of university inventions the role of a technology transfer office abstract we develop a theoretical model to explain the specific role of technology transfer offices ttos in licensing university inventions using a framework where firms have incomplete information on the quality of inventions we develop a reputation argument for the tto to reduce the asymmetric information problem our results indicate that a tto is often able to benefit from its capacity to pool innovations across research units and to build a reputation within universities we identify when the technology seller will have an incentive to shelve some of the projects thus raising the buyer s beliefs on expected quality this results in fewer but more valuable innovations being sold at higher prices we explain the importance of a critical size for the tto to be successful as well as the stylized fact that ttos may lead to fewer licensing agreements but higher income from innovation transfers

academic research underlying industrial innovations there has been no systematic study of the characteristics of the universities and academic researchers that seem to have contributed most to industrial innovation nor do we know how such academic research has been funded this paper based on data obtained from sixty six firms in seven major manufacturing industries and from over two hundred academic researchers sheds new light on the sources characteristics and financing of academic research underlying industrial innovation the findings should be of interest to economists concerned with technological change and to policymakers attempting to increase the economic payoff from the nation s academic research copyright 1995 by mit press

global and domestic utilization of industrial relevant science patent citation analysis of science technology interactions and knowledge flows abstract the development of science based technologies may draw heavily on codified and tacit outputs from both domestic research bases and foreign sources having a view of the scientific underpinnings of these technical innovations and related knowledge diffusion and utilization processes especially those concerning public financed basic research is of major importance to policymakers nowadays some of those scientific and technical inputs are pivotal to technical inventions and are acknowledged as such by explicit references citations to related research papers in the reference list on the corresponding patents this case study deals with citations to dutch authored research papers on uspto patents granted during the period 1987 1996 results of the citation analysis reveal several important features of contributions made by the dutch science base to dutch invented and or foreign invented patents such as 1 a marked overall increase of patent citations to dutch research papers and 2 significant differences between domestic and foreign citation patterns where 3 domestic citation links are dominated by author inventor self citations and patents originating from the large r d intensive multinational firms such as philips these findings provide new empirical evidence that patent citation analysis produces systemic quantitative data providing strategic background information regarding nation specific and sector specific factors in domestic and cross border science technology linkages and knowledge flows

the role of institution building in us industrial modernization programs abstract an important issue for evaluating industrial modernization programs is how well alternative intervention strategies address the underlying problems that contribute to uneven patterns of technology adoption the one on one industrial extension service model where the state agency provides technical assistance directly to individual firms constitutes one approach by contrast institution building approaches emphasize inter firm learning in which government serves as the catalyst for bringing technology developers together with potential users and for providing closer linkages between organizations that are the technology leaders and those that tend to be followers programs that support such inter firm learning opportunities stand a better chance of contending with the underlying problems retarding technology transfer are more likely to gain acceptability by both technology leaders and followers and are more likely to garner funds from the private sector

the relationships between science technologies and their industrial exploitation an illustration through the myths and realities of the so called european paradox abstract this paper discusses first the properties of scientific and technological knowledge and the institutions supporting its generation and its economic applications the evidence supports the broad interpretation that we call the stanford yale sussex synthesis second such patterns yield important implications with respect to the so called european paradox i e the conjecture that eu countries play a leading global role in terms of top level scientific output but lag behind in the ability of converting this strength into wealth generating innovations some descriptive evidence shows that contrary to the paradox conjecture europe s weaknesses reside both in its system of scientific research and in a relatively weak industry the final part of the paper identifies a few normative implications much less emphasis should be put on various types of networking and much more on policy measures aimed at strengthening both frontier research and european corporate actors

the effects of federal research and development subsidies on firm commercialization behavior abstract this paper assesses the longer term up to 14 years causal impact of federal research and development r d subsidies on firms commercialization behavior the data are for small firms which applied to the 1998 2000 advanced technology program atp competitions a variant of the research design pioneered by heckman 1979 allows for selection bias to be controlled for commercialization behavior is operationalized as the number of new product announcements related to the technology a firm mentions in its atp proposal s the major finding is that receiving an atp award has a positive and significant causal impact on a firm s commercialization behavior

performance benchmarking and measuring program impacts on customers lessons from the midwest manufacturing technology center abstract most attempts to evaluate the impact of manufacturing extension suffer from at least one of three weaknesses 1 subjectivity of the outcome data 2 inattention to industry leading to inappropriate outcome measures and 3 lack of controls this article reports on our work on the michigan manufacturing technology center mmtc evaluation effort and our attempts to redress these weaknesses since 1991 the mmtc has established a database of performance metrics tracking changes over time for both mmtc clients and a non client control group these data coupled with a detailed scheme for characterizing heterogeneous mmtc interventions provide the raw inputs for an analysis of the impact of mmtc operations analysis of the relative change in client performance from 1990 1992 and from 1991 1993 have demonstrated that mmtc clients are indeed taking some actions that lead to faster improvement relative to the control group but a notable exception is the area of employee computer use client firms are increasing their use of computers throughout the workforce at a slower rate than the control group this is of particular concern as employee computer use is strongly correlated with labor productivity which is closely related to improved profits and wages the article outlines our approach and analysis summarizes our recommendations to the mmtc for program improvements and reflects briefly on the lessons for manufacturing extension policy more generally

the welfare analysis of product innovations with an application to computed tomography scanners the main goal of this paper is to put forward a methodology for the measurement of product innovations using a value metric that is equating the magnitude of innovations with the welfare gains they generate this research design is applied to the case of computed tomography scanners a revolutionary innovation in medical technology the econometric procedure centers on the estimation of a discrete choice model the nested multinominal logit which yields the parameters of a utility function defined over the changing quality dimensions of the innovative product the estimated flow of social gains from innovation is used to compute a social rate of return to r d to explore the interrelation between innovation and diffusion and to trace the time profile of benefits and costs the latter suggesting the possible occurrence of technological cycles

academic research and industrial innovation the purpose of this study is to estimate the extent to which technological innovations in various industries have been based on recent academic research and the time lags between the investment in recent academic research projects and the industrial utilization of their findings because no attempt to my knowledge has been made to estimate the social rate of return from academic research we also make some rough and tentative estimates of this sort while the results are subject to many limitations discussed below they should be of interest to public policy makers concerned with science and technology as well as to

does manufacturing extension matter an evaluation of the industrial technology extension service in new york abstract building on pioneering state programs in the 1980s new federal initiatives call for a significant expansion in the scale and scope of manufacturing extension efforts in the united states this article presents an evaluation of one effort to spur industrial modernization the industrial technology extension service ites in new york state based on both qualitative and quantitative analysis the evaluation suggests that the ites program has had a favorable impact on many companies with respect to cost reductions and increased productivity the article discusses some of the difficult methodological issues in evaluating these types of programs and includes a series of recommendations on strengthening future evaluations to yield more definitive results

the economic impacts of academic spin off companies and their implications for public policy abstract the importance of academic research ar to economic growth is widely accepted but quantification of incremental impacts and their attribution to any one country s expenditures is difficult yet quantitative justification of government ar funding is highly desirable we therefore attempt to quantify one impact which can be directly and causally attributed to one country s funding spin off companies we focus on ar in the non medical natural sciences and engineering nsexm in a whole country canada applied disciplines are sometimes assumed to be the most commercializable so we also separately investigate an especially basic science physics using a novel methodology we estimate the lifetime impacts of companies spun off directly from ar performed in 1960 1998 and compare the impacts with all government funding direct and indirect over the same period this picks up virtually all funding and most company formation since wwii up to 1998 such long term studies are rare but essential since we show that successful spin offs grow often exponentially over several decades with very conservative assumptions and allowing for the time value of money the impacts exceed government funding by a substantial margin physics actually fares 30 60 better than the combined nsexm this reflects more successful companies rather than greater numbers and therefore does not seem inconsistent with earlier studies on company numbers firm lifetimes are long with canadian impacts truncated primarily by some foreign acquisitions we argue that the spin off impacts represent incremental contributions to gdp much larger even on a time discounted basis than the government funding and directly attributable to it governments will also receive more in additional tax than they spent the impacts therefore provide a quantitative justification for the public investment allowing the much more important but less quantifiable long term benefits to be regarded as a free bonus the very good showing of physics also suggests that reduced emphasis on basic work or on the basic disciplines could actually weaken the commercialization of ar

the inevitable limits of eu r d funding abstract the experience of the past 40 years in national policies for and european cooperation in science and technology points to clear conclusions about eu policies first the prevailing notions of technology gaps between europe and japan and the usa notions which have been a driving force in the eu policy for research and technology have been exaggerated however real gaps exist amongst the eu member countries themselves secondly it is unrealistic to expect eu funded r d programmes by themselves to make a substantial difference to the rate and direction of technical change in europe however eu policies for competition and other forms of regulation trade and investment can have a major influence on corporate decisions about technical change it is important for eu innovation policy to promote favourable framework conditions within which business firms are encouraged to improve their technological and related organisational practices

inventor moral hazard in university licensing the role of contracts abstract we examine commonly observed forms of payment such as milestones royalties or consulting contracts as ways of engaging inventors in the development of licensed inventions our theoretical model shows that when milestones are feasible royalties are not optimal unless the licensing firm is risk averse the model also predicts the use of consulting contracts which improve the firm s ability to monitor inventor effort because these contracts increase the firm s expected profits the upfront fee that the university can charge is higher than otherwise these results therefore support the commonly observed university policy of allowing faculty to consult with licensing firms outside of their university contracts they also support firm policies of including milestones an empirical analysis based on a survey of 112 businesses that license in university inventions supports the complementarity of milestones and consulting suggested by the theory

deterioration of the terms of trade and capital accumulation a reexamination of the laursen metzler effect abstract this paper analyzes the effect of both a permanent and a temporary deterioration in the terms of trade on a small open economy the model based on intertemporal optimization emphasizes the labor leisure choice and the role of capital accumulation the transitional dynamics is shown to depend upon the long run response of the capital stock to the terms of trade shock this consists of a negative substitution effect together with a positive income effect whether or not the laursen metzler effect holds depends upon whether the income effect dominates the substitution effect

terms of trade shocks and optimal investment another look at the laursen metzler effect conventional analyses of the effect of terms of trade shocks provide a misleading view of their impact on investment and the current account because capital goods imports are excluded from the analytical framework the author argues that such an exclusion is both arbitrary and unrealistic the author reexamines the consequences of permanent and transitory changes in terms of trade in a rational expectations model of a small open economy with intertemporally optimizing agents and with trade in both consumption and capital goods in this framework the responses to a permanent terms of trade improvement in unambiguous the long run capital stock and thus investment must rise and the current account must deteriorate exactly the opposite of the laursen metzler effect a transitory improvement in the terms of trade raises saving but has an uncertain effect on investment so the impact on the current account is generally ambiguous and is shown to depend on three factors the import contents on consumption and investment the duration of the windfall and the degree of intertemporal substitutability in both consumption and investment

globalisation of knowledge production and regional innovation policy supporting specialized hubs in the bangalore software industry abstract this paper is concerned with the changing role of regional innovation systems and regional policies in supporting the transition of indigenous firms in developing countries from competing on low costs towards becoming knowledge providers in global value chains special attention is paid to policies supporting the emergence and development of the regional innovation system in this transition process regional innovation systems in developing countries have very recently started to be conceptualised as specialized hubs in global innovation and production networks asheim b coenen l vang lauridsen j 2007 face to face buzz and knowledge bases socio spatial implications for learning innovation and innovation policy environment and planning c government and policy 25 5 655 670 chaminade c vang j 2006a innovation policy for small and medium size smes in asia an innovation systems perspective in yeung h ed handbook of research on asian business edward elgar cheltenham maggi c 2007 the salmon farming and processing cluster in southern chile in pietrobello c rabellotti r eds upgrading and governance in clusters and value chains in latin america harvard university press a specialized hub refers to a node in a global value chain that mainly undertakes one or a few of the activities required for the production and development of a given good or service or serves a particular segment of the global market in global value chains firms in developing countries have traditionally been responsible for the lowest added value activities however a few emerging regional innovation systems in developing countries are beginning to challenge this scenario by rapidly upgrading in the value chain there is however still only a poorly developed understanding of how the system of innovation emerges and evolves to support this transition process and what the role of regional innovation policy is in building the regional conditions that support indigenous small and medium size enterprises smes in this transition process this paper aims at reducing this omission by analyzing the co evolution of the strategies of indigenous smes and the regional innovation system of bangalore india

why do minority men earn less a study of wage differentials among the highly educated en in several minority groups in the united states have wages that are substantially lower than those of the benchmark majority group non hispanic white men several generations of labor economists have sought to understand the forces that drive these disparities this research program is potentially important for the purpose of determining whether minority wage gaps are likely to be narrowed more effectively by increasing enforcement of antidiscrimination laws or by implementing policies that reduce inequity in educational opportunity existing work shows large racial and ethnic differences in premarket factors especially formal schooling and suggests that these differences play a key role in shaping wage differences one example is trejo 1997 who finds that third and higher generation mexican american men earn 21 less than non hispanic white men approximately three quarters of the earnings gap is found to be attributable to the mexican americans relative youth and to differences in english language proficiency and years of schooling a second example is neal and johnson 1996 who find that black men earn 24 less than do non hispanic white men differences in schooling account for only about one fifth of this gap when the authors condition on performance on a basic verbal and math skills test the armed forces qualification test afqt though the differential between wages of blacks and whites declines to approximately onethird of its unadjusted level 1 trejo s 1997 study is a nice example of the traditional approach to studying race ethnicity wage gaps traditional in the sense that the explanatory variables in the study are conventional objective measures of human capital such as years of schooling and language ability neal and john

the changing rewards to science the case of biotechnology little is known about the form and or magnitude of compensation provided university based scientists working on firm r d this is unfortunate given the important role that university based scientists play in r d and the growing literature concerning compensation and innovation this paper sheds some light on these issues by examining the compensation of university based scientists involved with 52 biotech firms that made an initial public offering between march of 1990 and november of 1992 although the stock holdings of the university scientists are of particular interest additional forms of compensation received by the scientists are also examined

occupational segregation of hispanics in us metropolitan areas this article quantifies the occupational segregation of hispanics in the largest hispanic enclaves of the us using a procedure based on propensity score it explores the role played by the characteristics of hispanics such as country of origin and english fluency in explaining the variation of segregation across metropolitan areas regarding the characteristics of the metropolitan areas a regression analysis shows that the segregation of hispanic workers tends to be higher in relatively smaller and highly educated labour markets with a lower proportion of hispanics a higher growth of recent foreign born hispanics and in areas where they face cooler feelings from the rest of the population

academic spin off s transfer speed analyzing the time from leaving university to venture for academic spin offs i analyze the length of time between the founder s leaving of academia and the establishment of his firm technology transfer can take place even years after leaving the mother institution a duration analysis reveals that a longer time lag is caused by the necessity of assembling complementary skills either by acquisition by a single founder or by searching for suitable team members furthermore new ventures are established earlier if the intensity of technology transfer is high the founders have access to university infrastructure or received informal support by former colleagues

trust and the market for technology abstract conditional on the decision to enter the market for immature technology we test for the effects that trust proxied by the context in which the negotiating parties first met has on the likelihood that these negotiations are successful using survey responses from 860 university firm and firm firm technology transactions we find that trust matters parties with high levels of trust i e know each other from a previous business are between 6 and 23 per cent more likely to conclude a transaction compared with those with low levels of trust i e cold callers we also find that patents can effectively substitute for a lack of trust and that trust is more important in upstream stages basic or applied science

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

returns to r d on new drug introductions in the 1980s abstract this study finds that the mean irr for 1980 1984 u s new drug introductions is 11 1 and the mean npv is 22 million 1990 dollars the distribution of returns is highly skewed the results are robust to plausible changes in the baseline assumptions our work is also compared with a 1993 study by the ota despite some important differences in assumptions both studies imply that returns for the average nce are within one percentage point of the industry s cost of capital this is much less than what is typically observed in analyses based on accounting data

issues and perspectives on evaluating manufacturing modernization programs abstract the establishment of a national system of federal state manufacturing modernization centers to serve small and medium sized manufacturing systems is a major experiment in the us the system s rapid expansion has made it impossible to begin with an experimental design that would systematically permit tests of the variables and relationships likely to effect the long term economic effectiveness of these centers or their political and financial stability relatedly many existing evaluation studies and journalistic narratives are marred by serious analytical and empirical flaws it is not too late to attempt to improve practice in future evaluations several areas of expanded evaluation are described including theories of industrial restructuring regional technology infrastructure public management financing evaluation design evaluability assessment firm learning and measurement of benefits and costs in each case evaluation is presented as a means of simultaneously yielding information relevant to formative and summative program level decisions and to hypothesis testing

dynamic effects of a terms of trade shock on a small open economy abstract using a neoclassical one sector model extended to include investment installation costs this paper investigates the dynamic responses of consumption and external debt of a small open economy to a negative terms of trade shock in contrast to the existing literature we allow the divergence of the rate of time preference and the world interest rate the instantaneous change of net borrowing depends on the divergence of these rates and the existence of investment installation costs supporting the pattern of movement described by the j curve the instantaneous consumption change depends on whether or not the country is a debtor when the shock occurs

the microeconomics of manufacturing modernization programs abstract manufacturing modernization programs are designed to improve the competitiveness of small and medium sized manufacturers by accelerating their use of best practice technologies justification for these programs is most often cast in terms of past slow rates of adoption international economic competitiveness and market failures in the provision of information these frameworks however do not adequately address policy and programmatic issues related to program design financing and program evaluation using a microeconomic model based on the firm and industry level effects of these programs we examine the importance of spillover benefits from modernization efforts both horizontal spillovers to rivals of program clients and vertical spillovers to clients customers and the implications for these policy and programmatic issues

current practices in the evaluation of us industrial modernization programs abstract the expansion of public policies and programs to promote the technological modernization of small and mid sized manufacturing enterprises in the united states has been accompanied by an increased interest in assessing the effectiveness and impact of these initiatives this article examines current practices used in the evaluation of us industrial modernization programs at state and national levels drawing on interviews with program managers site visits and scrutiny of available studies issues related to the meaning of evaluation in the context of industrial modernization the scale and scope of existing programs and the definition of metrics are considered a series of evaluation approaches methods and studies are identified and reviewed including the role of program monitoring customer valuation external reviews economic impact studies control groups and assessments of best practice the authors address the use of evaluation results and discuss key challenges and directions relevant to the development of more robust evaluation procedures