carbon dioxide emissions and governance a nonparametric analysis for the g 20 this paper applies nonparametric estimators to examine countries carbon dioxide co2 emissions and governance relationship by using data for the time period 1996 2010 of the twenty largest economies group of twenty g 20 the dynamics of the considered relationship are analyzed six governance measures are included in our analysis voice and accountability political stability and absence of violence government effectiveness regulatory quality rule of law and control of corruption as have been defined in world governance indicators from the world bank the empirical findings reveal a nonmonotonic relationship between countries co2 emissions and the examined governance measures in addition and with respect to the environmental policy makers a significant difference on the number of governance measures influencing countries carbon dioxide emissions which is subject to countries specific regional and development variations is recorded finally the carbon dioxide emissions governance relationship is highly nonlinear and appears that countries higher governance quality does not always result to lower carbon dioxide emission levels

governance of competitive transmission investment in weak institutional systems despite progress in economic analysis in recent years transmission investment governance still poses policy design challenges in competitive electricity systems the degree of regulatory intervention in allocating investment costs is a central issue scholars tend to agree that centralized solutions are almost inevitable mainly due to free riding and coordination problems in systems with weak institutional endowments and pressures of distributive politics however there is an increased likelihood of regulators acting opportunistically or imposing arbitrary changes to the cost allocation rules which makes centralized solutions less desirable we provide some examples from argentina el salvador and peru and suggest that a two tier governance scheme composed of a self governing forum of transmission stakeholders with regulation as a subsidiary measure may be a more adequate design to restraint undue government interference the expected outcome is twofold a better match with users preferences and a restraint to government opportunism and arbitrariness measuring the robustness of this scheme in minimizing the risks for either too much or too little investment will certainly require further research

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

education and invention abstract modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage inventions are created by individuals raising the question of whether we can increase the number of inventors to answer this question we study the causal effect of msc engineering education on invention using data on u s patents finnish inventors and the distance to the nearest technical university as an instrument we find a positive effect of engineering education on the propensity to patent and a negative ols bias our counterfactual calculation suggests that establishing three new technical universities resulted in a 20 increase in the number of uspto patents by finnish inventors

mergers acquisitions and innovation performance in the telecommunications equipment industry the worldwide telecommunications equipment industry has experienced an enormous number of mergers and acquisitions m a this article examines the innovation determinants of m a activity a

power competition and the free trader vulgaris competition is taken for granted by neoclassical economics its cause is human nature and its functioning is the result of spontaneous interactions as such it is contrasted with power which is an unnatural restriction on human liberty by contrast marx discusses competition as a coercive mechanism historically competition develops with the development of market relations and what today appears as human nature is part of this process thus it is within competition and not outside of it that marx explains the coercive nature of capitalism his critique shows that competition and power appear to be antithetical because market relations are based on individual freedom however class relations are another essential aspect of capitalism by neglecting these relations neoclassical economists including those of a radical inspiration implicitly espouse the ruling class s viewpoint which they simply translate into rigorous mathematical terms in this sense they are the modern expression of what marx called the vulgar political economy

institutions and commitment the thrust of this paper is that to understand the roles institutions play in society a deep analysis of opportunism and its implications is necessary for that purpose a transactions costs cum positive political theory approach is developed with a focus on the role of institutions and their implications for regulatory commitment a major issue is restraining political opportunism countries that have succeeded in developing a healthy private sector are those that have developed institutions that restrain governmental decision making but such restraining is itself a political choice countries with electoral and legislative systems that bring about decentralized government have stronger chances of developing equilibria where government discretion is restrained copyright 1996 by oxford university press

transmission expansion in argentina 2 the fourth line revisited abstract in 1992 argentina introduced the public contest method which required transmission users to propose vote and pay for major expansions of the electricity transmission system economists consultants the regulator and others held the application of this method to be unsuccessful mainly on the ground that for many years it delayed investment in a much needed fourth line to buenos aires the commentators blamed externalities free rider problems the area of influence method used to define voting rights and transactions costs this paper re examines the history and economics of the fourth line the delay to the fourth line was short a year and a half rather than many years and enabled a significant reduction in construction costs externalities free riding the area of influence method and transactions costs were not problematic the fourth line was initially rejected because it was unprofitable to key beneficiaries far from being much needed the fourth line was not economic because the congestion it avoided was worth less than the cost of building it it had become more economic to transport gas to generate electricity near buenos aires than to transmit electricity over long distances the location of subsequent power stations reflected this even though the presence of a subsidy meant that the public contest method did not prevent the building of the fourth line it nonetheless forced a much needed reappraisal of traditional transmission investment policy

technology gap global value chain and carbon intensity evidence from global manufacturing industries abstract the technological progress of a country may mean that its technology gap compared to the frontier has changed which will induce a change in its positioning in the global value chain and affect its carbon intensity using paten data input output database and the global value chain index we employ systematic generalized method of moments quantile regression with panel data and multilevel mediation analysis to measure empirically the impact of the technology gap on carbon intensity and positioning on the global value chain the empirical analysis shows that narrowing the technology gap will reduce significantly a country s carbon intensity further the effect of the technology gap on carbon intensity is more pronounced on industries with higher carbon intensity the mechanism test using the mediation effect model proves that the impact of the technology gap on carbon intensity is achieved by changing in the position of global value chain the findings suggest that a country s carbon intensity performance is not only affected by its own technological progress but also by global frontiers therefore a country should not only pay attention to its own technological progress but also to the development of global frontier technologies and speed of technological progress

innovation cycles and learning at the patent office does the early patent get the delay we study the relationship between the length of patent review and the importance of inventions we build a simple model of the u s patent review process among the model predictions are that controlling for a patent s position in a new technology cycle more important innovations would be approved more quickly also the approval delay is likely to decrease as an industry moves from the early stages of an innovation cycle to later stages these predictions are in line with the evidence we obtain from a data set on u s patents granted in the field of genetically modified crops from 1983 to 1999 we also show that failing to account for the innovation lifecycle as previous studies have done is likely to bias upwards the estimates of the relationship between delay and importance 2010 the authors journal compilation 2010 blackwell publishing ltd and the editorial board of the journal of industrial economics

transmission pricing in privately owned electricity grids an illustration from the argentine electricity pool the argentine electricity reform of 1992 offers an interesting example of decentralized transmission pricing arrangements within a competitive system this paper is a shortened version of an original analysis made in 1994 of the regulation of the argentine transmission system with emphasis on investment cost allocation rules to make up for the limitation of short run marginal cost srmc pricing incentives on service quality were put in place including penalties for lack of line availability the mechanism for capacity expansion based on ad hoc rules for allocations of investment costs had the potential to produce non optimal investment outcomes as such rules ignored beneficiaries on the demand side for fine tuning of this system i proposed an alternative rule based on traditional welfare analysis that broadens the universe of identified beneficiaries and thus can be expected to produce a fairer outcome on investment cost allocation reducing the potential risks of non optimal investment a brief postscript comments on the paper from the perspective of 2007

publicly funded r d programs and survival of patents i apply a survival model to a detailed data set of swedish patents to estimate how different financing factors affect the likelihood of patent renewal since the owners know more about the patents than potential external financiers there is a problem of asymmetric information to overcome this sweden has for a long time relied on government support rather than private venture capital pvc in the empirical analysis two kinds of government loans are unbundled the empirical results show that patents which have received soft government loans in the r d phase have a higher probability of expiring than patents without such financing but patents that have received more market oriented government loans during the commercialization phase are renewed for as long as other commercialized patents this finding suggests that rather than bad choices of projects it is the nature of the contract terms that explains the low renewal of some patents with government financing

r d co practice and reverse knowledge integration in multinational firms this paper contributes to the developing literature on the management of distributed innovation in multinational firms we focus on a specific organizational mechanism r d co practice which we believe is an important facilitator of knowledge integration in multinationals with global innovation strategies in our formulation r d co practice joint technical activities between units increases levels of absorptive capacity and social capital among participating units thus increasing the likelihood that they will share knowledge at future time periods we find strong support for this hypothesis through an empirical analysis of reverse subsidiary to headquarters knowledge integration in two sectors automotive and pharmaceuticals over a 21 year period

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

what determines patent value insights from the semiconductor industry abstract this paper contributes to an understanding which impacts certain patent characteristics have on the value of patent rights in an exploratory study 127 individual patents from a semiconductor company were evaluated comprehensively by technical and marketing representatives the analysis of this rare data shows that for patents used as bargaining chips novelty and inventive activity are most important difficulty of inventing around and disclosure turn out to be of limited importance due to a selection bias the influence of patent age on its value cannot be determined the results hint at a differentiated theoretical plausibility of value indicators

characteristics of patent litigation a window on competition we examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to r d yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid 1980s we explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the patenting behavior of 95 u s semiconductor firms during 1979 1995 the results suggest that the 1980s strengthening of u s patent rights spawned patent portfolio races among capital intensive firms but it also facilitated entry by specialized design firms copyright 2001 by the rand corporation

the second theorem of the second best abstract this paper interprets many results from the literature on incentive compatibility and cost benefit analysis as illustrations of a second theorem of the second best the theorem states that if there exists any restriction on transactions required for first best efficiency then there is no presumption that a social welfare maximum entails equal marginal social utilities of income across individuals one reason is that incentive constraints shift with redistributions of wealth so that redistributions have an instrumental role in relaxing constraints that make the economy second best two examples relate such wealth effects to countervailing incentives and hostage taking

patents learning by doing and market structure in the chemical processing industries for a sample of 24 chemical products count data models are used to evaluate firms propensity to patent and the link between patented process innovations and output prices the results show that process patenting was largely an outgrowth of learning by doing propensity to patent increased with firm size but decreased with market concentration reductions in output prices were strongly linked to learning by doing and more weakly to the rate of patenting producer firms appear to have been more successful than non producers in appropriating the value of patented process innovations

determinants of cross national knowledge transfer and its effect on firm innovation this study examines the determinants of international knowledge flow from a resource based perspective it evaluates the impact of cross national knowledge transfer on firm innovative performance based on 56 027 us patents owned by 53 selected firms in the us based pharmaceutical industry the results suggest that innovative performance is a curvilinear function of the international knowledge content used by a firm to innovate as hypothesized it was found that at 1 low and moderate levels of international knowledge content a firm s strategy to transfer international knowledge improves its innovative performance and at 2 higher levels of international knowledge content there are diminishing marginal returns to transferring knowledge from overseas

integrating social conflict into economic theory the generalisation of coasian theorem to the power relationship amounts to depicting conflict as a bargaining process between conflictual parties that are simultaneously both partners and adversaries this perspective leads to different models of rational conflicts i e a threat of conflict without any real clash an alternative approach is developed by different models inspired by the public choice school which build upon the logic of coercive power within the framework of a self interested behaviour the integration of social conflicts in a narrowly defined individual cost benefit theoretical framework has resulted in reducing social conflict to real private but not social conflict in other words economic theory has considered social protesters either as potential or actual looters but rarely as a group of people struggling for a common cause integration of social conflict into economic theory will require i abandoning the ubiquitous market model when describing conflictual relationships ii accepting the logic of force or coercive power as a starting point and iii expanding the idea of interest to include encompassing including class interest

international trends in technological progress evidence from patent citations 1980 2011 we analyse cross country trends in several aspects of technological progress during 1980 2011 by examining the us patent citations data our estimation results on patent quality and citation lags relative to the us reveal the following the emerging asian economies of korea taiwan and china have achieved substantial catch up in the case of korea and taiwan progress has been made in both patent quality and citation lags china has achieved improvement in patent quality but not in citation lag in contrast advanced economies of europe and japan have displayed steady decline in patent quality while the us has strengthened its position

the dynamics of the transfer and renewal of patents this article explores new data on the transfer and renewal of u s patents and interprets this new evidence using a model of patent transfers and renewal we find that the proportion of transferred patents is large and differs across technology fields and especially type of patentees we also find that the probability of a patent being traded depends on a number of factors the age of the patent the number of citations received by a given age the patent generality and whether the patent has been previously traded or not these findings are consistent with the predictions of a model of patent transfers and renewals

co ownership of intellectual property exploring the value appropriation and value creation implications of co patenting with different partners combining both interview data and empirical analyses at the patent and firm levels we explore the value appropriation and value creation implications of r d collaboration resulting in the co ownership of intellectual property i e co patents we make an explicit distinction between three different types of co patenting partners intra industry partners inter industry partners and universities our findings indicate that the value appropriation challenges of ip sharing are clearly evident with intra industry co patenting where partners are more likely to encounter overlapping exploitation domains co patenting with universities is associated with higher market value since appropriation challenges are unlikely to play a role and collaboration may signal novel technological opportunities although we find some evidence that co patenting corresponds to higher patent value patents co owned with firms are significantly less likely to receive self citations indicating constraints on the future exploitation and development of co owned technologies

a great wall of patents what is behind china s recent patent explosion abstract china s patent surge documented in this paper is seemingly paradoxical given the country s weak record of protecting intellectual property rights using a firm level data set that spans the population of china s large and medium size industrial enterprises this paper explores the factors that account for china s rising patent activity while the intensification of research and development in the chinese economy tracks with patenting activity it explains only a fraction of the patent explosion the growth of foreign direct investment in china is prompting chinese firms to file for more patent applications amendments to the patent law that favor patent holders and ownership reform that has clarified the assignment of property rights also emerge as significant sources of china s patent boom these results are robust to alternative estimation strategies that account for over dispersion in the patent counts data and firm heterogeneity

contested exchange political economy and modern economic theory university of california berkeley department o f economics berkeley c a l i f o r n i a working paper 8876 contested exchange political economy and modern economic theory samuel bowles and herbert gintis june 8 1988 key words c o n t e s t e d exchange p o l i t i c a l jel c l a s s i f i c a t i o n economy

derivative ideas and the value of intangible assets we build a general equilibrium model where growth is driven by two invention types fundamental ideas that cause creative destruction and derivative ideas that enhance the value of existing inventions the model provides a new mapping from microeconomic patent data to aggregate total factor productivity growth and the aggregate value of privately owned knowledge we show how to measure the frequency of derivative ideas and the rate of creative destruction we estimate that derivative ideas account for 70 80 of all patents and their presence more than doubles the value of knowledge capital relative to what the measured innovation rate might otherwise imply

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

financial markets and the political structure of the enterprise abstract this paper argues that competitive financial markets disfavor democratic enterprises even assuming such enterprises suffer no allocational deficiencies this conclusion follows from five assertions a the democratic enterprise requires access to credit markets b access to credit presupposes access to equity markets c the democratic firm s optimal risk level is lower than that desired by stockholders d the risk level assumed by the firm is costly to observe subject to inaccurate measurement and contractually unenforceable and e the incentives required to induce stockholder favorable risk behavior are more costly for democratic firms than for firms with stockholder accountable management

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

the ontology of economic power in capitalism mainstream economics and marx mainstream economics conceives power to be incompatible with perfect competition this conception i argue derives from its deductivist method and the empirical realist ontology that it presupposes following marx i show that capitalism constantly reproduces asymmetrical constraints on classes of individuals independent of the market form my ontological argument is rooted in the philosophy of critical realism my conclusion is that the dichotomy power competition is ontologically untenable if capitalist relations necessarily involve power it is not simply because neoclassical competition does not exist in reality as radical mainstream economists suggest but rather because capitalism altogether is a system of power

the political feasibility of rural poverty reduction abstract policies oriented at the reduction of rural poverty will only be introduced if politically feasible computable general equilibrium and multimarket models have been widely used to measure the complex economic and welfare effects of these policies based on the body of theoretical and empirical knowledge on the determinants of influence by groups in civil society and on the role of the state in policy making an index of the political feasibility of policy outcomes is constructed use of this index with data from india and ecuador allows to identify a number of promising avenues to politically feasible reforms in particular by choosing policies that induce the emergence of supportive coalitions dominated by the nonpoor the general equilibrium effects and the leakages of antipoverty instruments are key in inducing emergence of these coalitions

patents as options some estimates of the value of holding european patent stocks in many countries holders of patents must pay an annual renewal fee in order to keep their patents in force this paper uses data on the proportion of patents renewed and the renewal fees faced by post world war ii cohorts of patents in france the united kingdom and germany in conjunction with a model of patent holders renewal decisions to estimate the returns earned from holding patents in these countries since patents are often applied for at a nearly stage in the innovation process the model allows agents to be uncertain about the sequence of returns that will be earned if the patent is kept inforce formally then the paper presents and solves a discrete choice optimal stochastic control model derives the implications of the model on aggregate behaviour and then estimates the parameters of the model from aggregate data the estimates enable a detailed description of the evolution of the distribution of returns earned from holding patents over their life spans and calculations of both the annual returns earned from holding the patents still in force or the patent stocks in the alternative countries and the distribution of the discounted value of returns earned from holding the patents in a cohort this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the technological origins of radical inventions this paper aims to trace down the origins of radical inventions in spite of many theoretical discussions on the effect of radical inventions the specific nature of radical inventions has received much less attention in the theoretical and empirical literature we try to fill that void by an empirical investigation into the specific origins of radical inventions we explore this issue by a close examination of 157 individual patents which are selected from a pool of more than 300 000 patents in contrast to the conventional wisdom that radical inventions are based less on existing knowledge we find that they are to a higher degree based on existing knowledge than non radical inventions a further result that follows from our analysis is that radical inventions are induced by the recombination over more knowledge domains the combination of knowledge from domains that might usually not be connected seems to deliver more radical inventions

the value of u s patents by owner and patent characteristics abstract this paper uses renewal data to estimate the value of u s patents controlling for patent and owner characteristics estimates of u s patent value are substantially larger than estimates for european patents however the ratio of u s patent value to r d for firms is only about 3 contrary to a common assertion patents issued to small patentees are much less valuable than those issued to large corporations litigated patents are more valuable as are highly cited patents however patent citations explain little variance in value suggesting limits to their use as a measure of patent quality

inter capital relations and the network organisation redefining the work and employment nexus the blurring of organisational boundaries associated with networks of organisations suggests the need to reconsider how work and employment are shaped by shifting inter capital relations traditional theories of the internalised employment relationship understate its inter relationship with both the form of inter capitalist competition and the type of inter capitalist production relations also existing theories of inter organisational contracting do not adequately address how these are shaped by employment relations both within and between organisations an alternative approach provides a new perspective for considering forms of countervailing power to protect workers interests in a capitalist system continuously shifting from integrated to non integrated forms copyright 2005 oxford university press

measuring patent s influence on technological evolution a study of knowledge spanning and subsequent inventive activity we introduce technological influence as a variable to measure an invention s direct and indirect impact on the evolution of technology this provides a novel means to study the short and long run effect of invention antecedents on technological evolution invention activity and economic growth a comparison between models of technological influence and direct technological impact is presented model estimations are based on data from semiconductor patents granted over a 5 year period results from quantile regression estimations show significant differences in the relationships between antecedents of technological influence and impact for example pioneering the spanning of knowledge boundaries has a positive relationship with the patent s influence while no relationship is found with direct citations these results have important implications for public policy and the management of technology they suggest the need for deeper understanding of the micro foundations of the technological evolution process and raise the question of whether inventors under current ip protection receive adequate economic incentives to promote actions driving economic growth

can patent family size and composition signal patent value abstractrecent research has proposed a method of patent valuation based on weighting patent family size by the market size of the countries in the family the premise is that inventors tend to seek

patent quality and research productivity measuring innovation with multiple indicators we analyse the determinants of the decline in research productivity using panel data on manufacturing firms in the us for the period 1980 93 we focus on three factors the level of demand the quality of patents and technological exhaustion we develop an index of patent quality using detailed patent information and show that using multiple indicators substantially reduces the measured variance in quality research productivity at the firm level is inversely related to patent quality and the level of demand as predicted by theory and patent quality is positively associated with the stock market value of firms

getting competition down to a science the effects of technological competition on firms scientific publications prior research about the interaction between private firms and the scientific community has largely viewed firms articles in scientific publications as a means to improve research and development productivity by encouraging their researchers to publish scientific papers firms can maintain linkages with the scientific community attract talent and access external knowledge on which they can build to create innovations this paper in contrast emphasizes the role of scientific publications in firms battles for market dominance and examines how competitive conditions shape firms propensities to publish scientific articles about their innovations focusing on the context of pharmaceutical drugs we develop propositions about how the competition that one drug faces from similar drugs and potential substitutes influences the innovating firm s inclination to publish articles in the top medical journals about that drug to facilitate its assessment by the u s food and drug administration and the medical community we also propose that scientific articles about competing drugs compel a firm to highlight its own drug in scientific papers to assert the drug s uniqueness and mitigate the threat of substitution whereas prior research has elucidated how science contributes to enhancing firms competence at creating innovations which is critical to their ability to compete in technology intensive environments this paper draws attention to how competition in turn permeates into the scientific arena creating inducements for firms to use scientific publications to position their innovations in the marketplace