technological innovation and long waves one who has examined the dynamics of capitalist economies over long historical periods can doubt that they experience significant long term variations in their aggregate perform ance the question is whether these long term variations are more than the outcome of a summation of random events and further whether they exhibit recurrent temporal regu larities that are sufficiently well behaved to call them long waves in recent years there has been a strong resurgence of interest in such long term movements since their existence could provide a coherent explanation for the poor performance of capitalist economies over the past decade 1 this renewed interest also reflects a search for alternative ways of explaining the unbalanced nature of the growth processes of mature capitalist economies that go uncaptured by the solow swan paradigm in its concern with equilibrium dynamics and steady states of one two or multisector representations of the economy the study of price and output swings of extended duration has a long tradition having initially drawn the interest of both marxist and non marxist writers around the turn of the century 2 yet it was the work of kondratiev 1925 which constituted the first system atic attempt to confirm such movements with data that included not only prices interest rates and wage series but foreign trade industrial production and consumption for france britain and to a lesser extent the us kondratiev concluded that the data suggested the

natural resources curse or blessing are natural resources a curse or a blessing the empirical evidence suggests that either outcome is possible this paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources these include that a resource bonanza induces appreciation of the real exchange rate deindustrialization and bad growth prospects and that these adverse effects are more severe in volatile countries with bad institutions and lack of rule of law corruption presidential democracies and underdeveloped financial systems another hypothesis is that a resource boom reinforces rent grabbing and civil conflict especially if institutions are bad induces corruption especially in nondemocratic countries and keeps in place bad policies finally resource rich developing economies seem unable to successfully convert their depleting exhaustible resources into other productive assets the survey also offers some welfare based fiscal rules for harnessing resource windfalls in developed and developing economies

frontiers and sustainable economic development exploiting new resource frontiers such as agricultural land and mineral reserves is a fundamental feature of economic development in poor economies yet frontier based development is symptomatic of a pattern of economy wide resource exploitation in developing economies that a generates little additional economic rents and b what rents are generated are not being reinvested in other sectors such development is inherently unsustainable the following paper explains this phenomenon and provides evidence that long run expansion of agricultural land and oil and natural gas proved reserves across poor economies is associated with lower levels of real income per capita the paper proposes a frontier expansion hypothesis to explain why the structural economic dependence of these economies on frontier land expansion and resource exploitation is not conducive to sustained long run growth the key to sustainable economic development in poor economies will be improving the economic integration between frontier and other sectors of the economy targeting policies to improved resource management in frontier areas and overcoming problems of corruption and rent seeking in resource sectors

the long term consequences of resource based specialisation using geological variation in oil abundance in the southern us i examine the long term effects of resource based specialisation through economic channels in 1890 oil abundant counties were similar to other nearby counties but after oil was discovered they began to specialise in its production from 1940 90 oil abundance increased local employment per square kilometre especially in mining but also in manufacturing oil abundant counties had higher population growth higher per capita income and better infrastructure 2010 the author s the economic journal 2010 royal economic society

build or buy strategies in the local loop we provide a dynamic model to study how the presence of the option to buy the incumbent local exchange carrier s ilec facilities via local loop unbundling affects the competitive local exchange carriers clecs incentives to build alternative infrastructures we show that an unregulated incumbent sets a rental path for its local loop which delays technology adoption compared to the case in which there is no unbundling we also characterize the equilibrium rental path set by the unregulated incumbent it is prohibitively high at the initial phases when there is no effective threat of entry with alternative technologies and it is decreasing over time in later phases the decrease in the rental price follows the rise of the entrant s opportunity cost of leasing lines we also argue that neither allowing higher prices for unbundled elements over time nor setting a sunset clause would suffice to induce facility based competition by studying the unregulated ilecs decision regarding unbundling we challenge the implicit assumption behind the sunset clauses which is that the ilec would either deny unbundling or charge too high a price for its network elements in the absence of regulation we claim that the ilecs that initially resist unbundling requirements would tend to charge attractive access prices relative to the entrants alternatives for their infrastructure which become less essential over time this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

emissions trading and technology deployment in an energy systems bottom up model with technology learning abstract an important criterion in the analysis of climate policy instruments is their ability to stimulate the technological change necessary to enable the long term shift towards a low carbon global energy system in this paper some effects of emissions trading on technology deployment when technology learning is endogenized are examined with a multi regional bottom up energy systems optimization markal model of the global energy system in this framework due to the action of spillovers of learning imposing emission constraints on a given region may affect the technology choice and emissions profiles of other unconstrained regions the effects depend on the geographical scale of the learning process but also on the presence of emissions trading the regions that join the trade system and their timing for doing so incorporating endogenous technology learning and allowing for spillovers across regions appears as an important mechanism for capturing the possibility of induced technological change due to environmental constraints in bottom up models

a review of o rourke and williamson s globalization and history the evolution of a nineteenth century atlantic economy much of the comparative economic history of the nineteenth century focuses on the spread of the industrial revolution from britain incomes converged in this view as the transfer of superior technology raised incomes in the periphery in globalization and history kevin o rourke and jeffrey williamson challenge this technological approach arguing that neoclassical effects of trade and factor supply changes provide more insight increased trade stimulated by falling transportation costs and factor movements caused prices of locally scarce factors to fall and promoted factor price convergence

the organisation of innovation collaboration cooperation and multifunctional groups in uk and german manufacturing marked differences exist between the institutional and social context for innovation in the uk and germany the question addressed here is how these different contexts affect the objectives and organisation of innovation in uk and german manufacturing in particular the paper examines the extent to which uk and german plants engage in inter plant collaboration and cooperation and multifunctional working as part of their innovative activity and explores the reasons for differences in these patterns of involvement the investigation is based on a large scale comparative survey of manufacturing plants in the two countries in germany institutional and social norms are found to encourage collaborative inter plant innovation but aspects of the german skills training and industrial relations systems make the adoption of more flexible internal systems more difficult in the uk by contrast the more adversarial nature of inter firm relations makes it more difficult to establish external collaborations based on mutual trust but less restrictive labour market structures make it easier for uk plants to adopt multifunctional working this is linked to differences in attitudes to the property rights and transaction cost problems inherent in innovation

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

towards a more historical approach to technological change an economic historian does not get far in trying to interpret the comparative performance of national economies without confronting issues surrounding the conceptualisation and measurement of technology thus i have found myself in recent years wrestling with the historical phenomenon known as american technological leadership and this research experience has generated some views on more general matters vernon ruttan s assessment of the current state of the field is relatively unfavourable in his view promising theoretical beginnings such as induced innovation and path dependence have not been successfully integrated with each other nor with a programme of empirical research approaches to endogenous growth have not yet confronted the research and development process in all its richness and micro level detail this critique has much validity with respect to the more abstract literature cited but i would point in contrast to a number of promising recent efforts to transmute theoretical concepts into operational research agendas and empirical projects as laid out most clearly by arrow i 962 investment in research for the purpose of generating new technology differs in two fundamental ways from conventional investment appropriability and uncertainty broadly speaking those economic sectors that exhibit high rates of technological progress over extended periods are those that have solved these two problems in one way or another in the united states just five industries have accounted for more than 7500 of all industrial r d spending in the postwar period aircraft electrical machinery non electrical machinery chemicals and allied products and motor vehicles rosenberg i992 pp 66 9 but the specific institutional structures that have mitigated problems of appropriability and risk have varied widely private market power government procurement programmes legal protection for intellectual property cooperative and non profit research arrangements and diversified risk portfolios have all been important in one or another instance but one would not expect to find many stable empirical regularities with respect to any subset of these variables one of the implications of this perspective is that it is difficult both in practice and in principle to maintain a clear distinction between innovations in pure technology on the one hand and adoptions or diffusion of alreadyexisting technologies on the other romer i996 argues that the most basic distinction among productive inputs is between ideas and things the first being non rival though sometimes imperfectly excludable in use the latter

voracious transformation of a common natural resource into productive capital i analyze a power struggle where competing factions have private financial assets and deplete a common stock of natural resources with no private property rights i obtain a feedback nash equilibrium to the dynamic common pool problem and obtain political variants of the hotelling depletion rule and the hartwick saving rule resource prices and depletion occur too fast so substitution away from resources to capital occurs too fast and the saving rate is too high the power struggle boosts output but depresses sustainable consumption genuine saving is nevertheless zero in a fractionalized society world bank estimates may be too optimistic

resource egalitarianism with a dash of efficiency abstract we study the problem of defining inequality averse social orderings over allocations of commodities when individuals have different preferences we formulate a notion of egalitarianism based on the axiom that any dominance between consumption bundles should be reduced this dominance aversion requirement is compatible with consensus a version of the pareto principle saying that an allocation y is better than x whenever everybody finds that everyone s bundle at y is better than at x we characterize a family of multidimensional leximin orderings satisfying dominance aversion and consensus

natural resources and economic development new panel evidence the question as to whether natural resources are a curse on economic growth and development is subject to considerable debates and remains controversial using heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques this paper provides a fresh re examination of the resource curse while allowing for cross section heterogeneity and commonalities in the nexus between natural resource abundance and economic development it finds in a sample of developing countries that economies endowed with abundant natural resources tend to develop more slowly than countries with scarce resources natural resources are on average a curse however there is considerable heterogeneity in the effects of resource abundance on economic development across countries perhaps because of differences in the extent of government intervention access to sound money legal structures and the security of property rights the degree of globalization and or corruption

rising trade costs agglomeration and trade with endogenous transaction costs while transport costs have fallen the empirical evidence also points at rising total trade costs in a model of industry location with endogenous transaction costs that seeks to replicate features from the machinery industry we show how and under which conditions a decline in transport costs can lead to an increase in the total cost of trade the subtle relationship between endogenous transport costs and the sensitivity of trade

convergence in the pre 1914 atlantic economy what really happened to wages in ireland between 1881 and 1911 after the famine irish wages caught up to those of great britain catch up is ascribed to globalised labour markets and the effects of emigration however current estimates of the level of irish wages and their rate of growth are based on a small sample of the male workforce this article presents estimates of the average wage for all wage earners and the irish wage bill this enables an estimate of an implied british average wage and wage bill the new estimates show that although there was significant wage catch up in a few occupations in general catch up was less rapid than recent studies have suggested the origins of this catch up are also examined consistent with earlier studies which emphasise modernisation of the post famine economy the evidence of this article is consistent with the effects of traditional convergence forces such as tfp growth capital accumulation and structural change operating alongside the effects of emigration

a stochastic dominance approach to the measurement of discrimination abstract this note suggests a bridge between stochastic dominance rothschild and stiglitz 1970 17 1973 18 inequality measurement atkinson 1970 1 and discrimination measurement gastwirth 1975 10 discrimination orderings are defined and illustrated through discrimination curves in the same spirit as stochastic dominance analysis the main result which links the second order discrimination curve and the gastwirth discrimination index also generalizes the equivalence between generalized lorenz dominance and second order stochastic dominance

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

why do some resource abundant countries succeed while others do not on average resource abundant countries have experienced lower growth over the last four decades than their resource poor counterparts but the most interesting aspect of the paradox of plenty is not the average effect of natural resources but its variation for every nigeria or venezuela there is a norway or a botswana why do natural resources induce prosperity in some countries but stagnation in others this paper gives an overview of the dimensions along which resource abundant winners and losers differ in light of this it then discusses different theory models of the resource curse with a particular emphasis on recent developments

natural resource abundance and human capital accumulation summary this paper studies the link between resource abundance and human capital accumulation it reviews the commonly used indicators of resource abundance and human capital accumulation the case for a form of resource curse in human capital accumulation is not robust to reasonable changes in these indicators in fact subsoil wealth and resource rents per capita are shown to be significantly correlated with improved indicators of human capital accumulation if mineral wealth is what authors have in mind when they refer to natural resource abundance then they should choose indicators that measure this concept as accurately as possible

ranking income distributions a large variety of policy questions involve choices between social states and a consequent ordering of the feasible alternatives when these social states are related to the levels of welfare experienced by individuals or households two central issues stand out in determining the relative desirability of different social outcomes one of these is the essentially positive exercise of achieving comparability between households with different characteristics such as composition or preferences operating in different environments for example facing different price structures the other concerns the normative judgments implicit in the evaluation of alternative allocations of resourcesthe emphasis placed on inequality between households and the extent to which greater inequality can be compensated by higher average living standards this paper focuses on the second of these issues and in doing so we abstract from the problem of household comparability by considering a population of n households identical in all respects except for their incomes the question of ordering social states then becomes one of ranking income distributions over a group of anonymous households or individuals borrowing the usual assumptions imposed on consumer preferences we may suppose that a social ordering of income distributions can be represented by a welfare function 2

ethically robust comparisons of bidimensional distributions with an ordinal attribute abstract we provide foundations for robust normative evaluation of distributions of two attributes one of which is cardinally measurable and transferable between individuals and the other is ordinal and non transferable the result that we establish takes the form of an analogue to the standard hardy littlewood polya theorem for distributions of one cardinal attribute more specifically we identify the transformations of the distributions which guarantee that social welfare increases according to utilitarian unanimity provided that the utility function is concave in the cardinal attribute and that its marginal utility with respect to the same attribute is non increasing in the ordinal attribute we establish that this unanimity ranking of the distributions is equivalent to the ordered poverty gap quasi ordering introduced by bourguignon 12 finally we show that if one distribution dominates another according to the ordered poverty gap criterion then the former can be derived from the latter by means of an appropriate and finite sequence of such transformations

access pricing competition and incentives to migrate from old to new technology abstract in this paper we analyze the incentives of an incumbent and an entrant to migrate from an old technology to a new technology and discuss how the terms of wholesale access affect this migration we show that the coverage of the new technology varies non monotonically with the access price of the old technology a higher access charge on the legacy network pushes the entrant firm to invest more but has an ambiguous effect on the incumbent s investments due to two conflicting effects the wholesale revenue effect and the retail level migration effect when the new technology is also subject to access provision we find that migration from the old to the new generation network at the wholesale level can be incentivized if a positive correlation between the access prices to the two old and new generation networks is maintained

the power of integrality linkages between product architecture innovation and industry structure abstract a substantial literature stream suggests that many products are becoming more modular over time and that this development is often associated with a change in industry structure towards higher degrees of specialization these developments can have strong implications for an industry s competition as the history of the pc industry illustrates to add to our understanding of the linkages between product architecture innovation and industry structure we develop detailed product architecture measurements based on a previously proposed method fixson s k 2005 product architecture assessment a tool to link product process and supply chain design decisions journal of operations management 23 3 4 345 369 and study an unusual case in which a firm through decreasing its product modularity turned its formerly competitive industry into a near monopoly using this case study we explore how existing theories on modularity explain the observed phenomenon and show that most consider technological change in rather long term dimensions and tend to focus on efficiency related arguments to explain the resulting forces on competition we add three critical aspects to the theory that connects technological change and industry dynamics first we suggest integrating as a new design operator to explain product architecture genesis second we argue that a finer grained analysis of the product architecture shows the existence of multiple linkages between product architecture and industry structure and that these different linkages help explain the observed intra industry heterogeneity across firms third we propose that the firm boundary choice can also be a pre condition of the origin of architectural innovation not only an outcome of efficiency considerations

oil growth and health what does the cross country evidence really show we show that previous results from the body of literature on the resource curse have primarily been driven by the collapse in oil prices during the mid 1980s by exploiting cross country variations in the size of initial oil endowments and the timing of oil discoveries we find that there is a stable positive relationship between oil abundance and long run economic growth using dynamic panel data methods we also find that there is no evidence that higher oil rents hinder growth however to focus on material gain means that the welfare gain from oil is understated because oil rich countries benefit more by the reduction in infant mortality and the gain in longevity interestingly such oil led health improvements are more pronounced in non democratic countries where initial heath conditions were poor and oil wealth is concentrated among the ruling elites

do natural resources fuel authoritarianism a reappraisal of the resource curse a large body of scholarship finds a negative relationship between natural resources and democracy extant cross country regressions however assume random effects and are run on panel datasets with relatively short time dimensions because natural resource reliance is not an exogenous variable this is not an effective strategy for uncovering causal relationships numerous sources of bias may be driving the results the most serious of which is omitted variable bias induced by unobserved country specific and time invariant heterogeneity to address these problems we develop unique historical datasets employ time series centric techniques and operationalize explicitly specified counterfactuals we test to see if there is a long run relationship between resource reliance and regime type within countries over time both on a country by country basis and across several different panels we find that increases in resource reliance are not associated with authoritarianism in fact in many specifications we generate results that suggest a resource blessing

growth theory and industrial revolutions in britain and america abstract long run economic growth has again become a major focus of economic theory a perception of technological change as an economic process with externalities has motivated the development of aggregate models that generate different steady state growth paths economic history has also long been interested in long run economic growth here a dialogue is presented between growth theory and the historical literature on the industrial revolution in britain and america s surge to international economic leadership in the late nineteenth century in conclusion economists recent thinking about the microeconomics of technological change has provided fruitful material for the economic historian of growth unfortunately the models of endogenous growth on the other hand present too aggregated a view of the economy to prove helpful when confronted with the details of economic history jel classification n0 n1 1 theorie de la croissance et revolutions industrielles en grande bretagne et en amerique la croissance economique a long terme est redevenue un point d interet majeur pour la theorie economique une perception du changement technologique comme processus economique porteur d externalites a engendre le developpement de modeles agreges qui generent differents sentiers de croissance en regime permanent l histoire economique s interesse depuis longtemps a la croissance economique a long terme ce texte engage le dialogue entre la theorie de la croissance et la litterature historique a propos de la revolution industrielle en grande bretagne et de l emergence de l amerique au statut de leader international a la fin du dix neuvieme siecle on en arrive a la conclusion que les recents developpements dans la pensee economique a propos de la micro economie du changement technologique ont produit des resultats utiles pour l histoire economique de la croissance malheureusement d autre part les modeles de croissance endogene presente une vue trop agregee de l economie pour s averer utile dans l examen des details de l histoire economique

patent protection and strategic delays in technology development implications for economic growth we present an endogenous growth model in which both the investment to develop a new technology that upgrades the quality of machines and entry of imitators are determined endogenously according to the model how soon the new technology machine is launched after the patent is granted is influenced by two factors returns to scale in technology development and strategic delays strategic delays in technology development are most likely to occur when earlier dates of success enable imitators to enter an industry i e when imitation is swift and relatively cheap and or patent protection is relatively lengthy we then explore the link between the optimal patent length and economic growth and find that the equilibrium investment in technology development and thus the expected rate of technological progress exhibit an inverted u shape relationship with respect to the legal patent length our results further suggest that in order to minimize the strategic delays in technology development and spur technological progress legal patent lengths should be shorter in industries where barriers to entry are relatively low

exploration and development of u s oil and gas fields 1955 2002 we study the exploration and development of oil and gas fields in the u s over the period 1955 2002 we make four contributions to explain the economic evolution of the oil and gas industry during this period first we derive a testable model of the dynamics of competitive oil and gas field exploration and development second we show how to empirically distinguish hotelling scarcity effects from effects due to technological change third we test these hypotheses using statewide panel data of exploration and development drilling we find that the time paths of exploration development and total wells drilled are dominated by hotelling scarcity effects finally we offer an explanation for why fixed costs from exploration can make the contracting equilibrium in the mineral rights market efficient

alfred chandler and knowledge management within the firm this essay examines the role of knowledge management defined as the management of processes affecting the creation communication distribution and exploitation of knowledge concerning corporate strategy markets product and process technologies and management practices within the corporation in alfred d chandler s work on the modern corporation along with efforts to avoid transaction cost problems the management of firm specific information and knowledge was central to the 19th century transformation of us corporate structure that chandler examined in the visible hand knowledge management also played a key role in the creation of intrafirm organizations for managing the creation of knowledge management of innovation and acquisition of technologies from external sources industrial r d and the product diversification that emerged from the in house r d facilities of many of these firms contributed to the development of the so called m form corporation examined by chandler in strategy and structure in which corporate management and strategy formulation were organizationally differentiated and separated from functional management finally chandler s last work on the success and failure of united states japanese and western european firms in the modern electronics pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries emphasized the role of the integrated learning base within these firms and the varying degrees of success with which established firms were able to sustain these learning bases and or apply them to new markets and technologies copyright 2010 the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

beyond the algebra of explanation hov for the technology age it is hard to believe that factor endowments theory could offer an adequate explanation of international trade patterns while the theory adequately predicts saudi arabian oil exports it hardly seems appropriate for explaining the revolutionary impact of new technologies on world trade yet to take this position is to misunderstand the thrust of recent empirical research in international trade research that is giving shape to a new generation of heckscher ohlin vanek hov thinking the core of this new thinking is a class of hov predictions that allow for international differences in technology and choice of techniques the literature is in the process of rapid evolution as a result the key questions tend to get lost there have been three of them first what empirical regularities account for the poor performance of the hov model second are there alternative assumptions about technology that lead to better test results for the model both of these are interesting questions but they hardly constitute an end point for understanding the impacts of international trade as edward e leamer 1993 p 439 pointed out e conomists ought to abandon the idea that models are either true or false in favor of the notion that models are sometimes useful and sometimes misleading the third and most important question is whether the hov model provides a useful framework for thinking about international technology differences in spite of the defects of the model the answer is a definite yes 9

the shifting natural wealth of nations the role of market orientation this paper explores the effect of market orientation on known natural resource wealth using a novel dataset of world wide major hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries consistent with the predictions of a two region model the empirical estimates based on a large panel of countries show that increased market orientation causes a significant increase in discoveries of natural resources in a thought experiment whereby economies in latin america and sub saharan africa remained closed they would have only achieved one quarter of the actual increase in discoveries they have experienced since the early 1990s the results call into question the commonly held view that natural resource endowments are exogenous

on the sources and significance of interindustry differences in technological opportunities abstract the set of technological opportunities in a given industry is one of the fundamental determinants of technical advance in that line of business we examine the concept of technological opportunity and discuss three categories of sources of those opportunities advances in scientific understanding and technique technological advances originating in other industries and in other private and governmental institutions and feedbacks from an industry s own technological advances data from the yale survey on industrial research and development are used to measure the strength of various sources of technological opportunity and to discern interindustry differences in the importance of these sources we find that interindustry differences in the strength and sources of technological opportunities contribute importantly to explanations of cross industry variation in r d intensity and technological advance

comparative risk aversion a formal approach with applications to saving behavior we consider a formal approach to comparative risk aversion and applies it to intertemporal choice models this allows us to ask whether standard classes of utility functions such as those inspired by kihlstrom and mirman 1974 selden 1978 epstein and zin 1989 and quiggin 1982 are well ordered in terms of risk aversion moreover opting for this model free approach allows us to establish new general results on the impact of risk aversion on savings behaviors in particular we show that risk aversion enhances precautionary savings clarifying the link that exists between the notions of prudence and risk aversion

mineral wealth and human capital accumulation a nonparametric approach this article uses a nonparametric approach to investigate the nexus between mineral wealth and human capital accumulation across countries higher mineral wealth is associated with elevated levels

revisiting international business theory a capabilities based theory of the mne an introduction to this issue of the journal of international business studies in which the author discusses a capabilities based theory of multinational enterprises mne is presented

why do firms do basic research with their own money abstractthe question to be addressed is why do private firms perform basic research with their own money interest in this question derives from both analytical and utilitarian considerations there is empirical evidence in the united states which provides the main context for this paper supporting the view that basic research makes a significant contribution to the productivity growth of the economy 4 7 it is widely held that social returns from basic research are significant and higher than private returns and it is for this reason that most such activities continue to be financed by the taxpayer this also implies that measures aimed at increasing basic research by the private sector will be welfare improving in the united states the federal government in the years since the second world war has provided the vast majority of all funds devoted to basic research although the federal share has been declining in recent years and although that share is at its lowest level in about 20 years it still constitutes about two thirds of the total 10 this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

asymmetric access price regulation in telecommunications markets abstract in liberalized telecommunications markets the incumbent typically enjoys several advantages over any entrant regulation in such asymmetric markets stimulates competition in the short and the long term if retail prices are low and the entrant s profits are high so that entry is encouraged i show that asymmetric access price regulation with a cost based access price for the incumbent and an access markup for the entrant is more successful than cost based access price regulation applied to incumbent and entrant this is a robust prediction with respect to the pricing strategies considered such asymmetric access price regulation is in accordance with european legislation

gpt driven endogenous growth seven years after helpman s 1998 book on general purpose technologies gpts there is a dearth of subsequent models early models employed technically complex dynamic optimising techniques which limited further development we present a model in which sustained growth is driven by a succession of gpts that is technically simpler than the early models yet captures stylised facts that were omitted from them ours has diminishing returns to inputs and endogenous incremental technological changes from r d interrupted by the occasional introduction of new gpts gpts are themselves developed endogenously with payoffs that are subject to uncertainty in magnitude and timing

designing input prices to motivate process innovation abstract we examine the optimal design of regulated input prices accounting explicitly for their impact on incentives for process innovation optimal input prices are shown to vary both with the prevailing vertical industry structure and with the nature of downstream competition the optimal input pricing rule tends to provide stronger incentives for innovation under vertical integration than under vertical separation in the presence of downstream cournot competition the stronger incentives tend to be implemented under vertical separation in the presence of downstream bertrand competition

technological learning in offshore wind energy different roles of the government offshore wind energy is a promising source of renewable electricity even though its current costs prevent large scale implementation technological learning has improved the technology and its economic performance already and could result in significant further improvements this study investigates how technological learning takes place in offshore wind energy and how technological learning is related to different policy regimes offshore wind energy developments in denmark and the united kingdom have been analysed with a technology specific innovation systems approach the results reveal that the dominant forms of learning are learning by doing and learning by using at the same time learning by interacting is crucial to achieve the necessary binding elements in the technology specific innovation system generally most learning processes were performed by self organizing entities however sometimes cultural and technical barriers occurred excluding component suppliers and knowledge institutes from the innovation system danish policies successfully anticipated these barriers and removed them therefore the danish policies can be characterized as pro active british policies shaped stable conditions for learning only therefore they can be characterized as active in the future barriers could hinder learning by interacting between the oil and gas industry the offshore wind industry and academia based on this study we suggest national and international policy makers to design long term policies to anticipate these barriers in order to contribute to technological learning

institutions and the resource curse countries rich in natural resources constitute both growth losers and growth winners we claim that the main reason for these diverging experiences is differences in the quality of institutions more natural resources push aggregate income down when institutions are grabber friendly while more resources raise income when institutions are producer friendly we test this theory building on sachs and warner s influential works on the resource curse our main hypothesis that institutions are decisive for the resource curse is confirmed our results contrast the claims of sachs and warner that institutions do not play a role

is demand pulled innovation equally important in different groups of firms previous empirical literature has tested the demand pull hypothesis and found that innovation may be driven by output using a balanced panel of 216 italian manufacturing firms 1995 2000 and checking for the path dependent nature of r d we find a role of sales in inducing r d however the demand pull effect plays a varying role for different sub samples of firms exporting firms liquidity constrained firms not subsidised firms and those not heading a group seem to be sensitive to sales in deciding r d these results have been obtained using a least squares dummy variable corrected estimator a recent panel data technique suitable for small samples

equally distributed equivalent utility ex post egalitarianism and utilitarianism we provide an axiomatization of expected equally distributed equivalent utility social welfare functions in the context of harsanyi s impartial observer theorem for this family of social welfare functions we show what additional axiom is necessary and sufficient for the observer to exhibit aversion to ex post inequality we also relate this axiomatization to our axiomatization in a companion paper of generalized utilitarian social welfare functions given certain richness assumptions the only social welfare functions that belong to both families are the utilitarian

the dynamics of innovative activity and competitive advantage the case of australian retail banking 1981 to 1995 this study examines the adoption of new products and processes in the australian retail banking industry over the 1981 to 1995 period our analysis demonstrates that the vast majority of observed innovative activity was based on ideas sourced from outside the focal firm and that innovations diffused very quickly across competing banks as such there were no periods during which any bank had proprietary possession of a major product or process innovation we therefore ask how the banks innovative activity could affect their relative financial performance positions we answer this question by developing a set of hypotheses that relate specific features of their histories of innovative activity to their current financial performance these hypotheses are tested using a detailed data set describing 1 297 modifications made to products and services distribution technologies and back office processes within a sample of australian retail banks over the sample period our results provide support for the general position that establishing an attractive competitive position depends on the specific history of a firm s innovative activity banks that undertook more innovative activity that were more consistent in that activity and whose composition of activity was somewhat differentiated from the industry norm tended to display superior financial performance rather than looking solely for internally generated inimitable innovations to deliver competitive advantage these results suggest that active and consistent innovative activity that is somewhat differentiated from competitors can also deliver superior financial performance

on the measurement of inequality under uncertainty abstract to take into account both ex ante and ex post inequality considerations one has to deal with inequality and uncertainty simultaneously under certainty much of the literature has focused on comonotonically linear indices functionals that are linear on cones of income profiles that agree on the social ranking of the individuals this family generalizes both the gini index and the egalitarian index minimal income however it does not include functionals such as the average of expected gini and gini of expectation in contrast the family of min of means functionals is rich enough for this purpose journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63 d81

increasing returns and the genesis of american resource abundance the usa became the world s leading mineral producing nation between 1870 and 1910 a development paralleled by the rising resource intensity of american manufacturing this paper challenges the premise that resource abundance simply reflected the country s geological endowment of mineral deposits instead in the century following 1850 the usa exploited its natural resource potentials to a far greater extent than other countries and did so across virtually the entire range of industrial minerals the paper argues that natural resource abundance was an endogenous socially constructed condition that was not geologically preordained it examines the complex legal institutional technological and organizational adaptations that shaped the us supply responses to the expanding domestic and international industrial demands for minerals and mineral products it suggests that strong positive feedbacks even in the exploitation of depletable resources were responsible for the explosive growth of the american minerals economy

inside the black box technology and economics economists have long treated technological phenomena as events transpiring inside a black box and on the whole have adhered rather strictly to a self imposed ordinance not to inquire too seriously into what transpires inside that box the purpose of professor rosenberg s work is to break open and examine the contents of the black box in so doing a number of important economic problems be powerfully illuminated the author clearly shows how specific features of individual technologies have shaped a number of variables of great concern to economists the rate of productivity improvement the nature of learning processes underlying technological change itself the speed of technology transfer and the effectiveness of government policies that are intended to influence technologies in particular ways the separate chapters of this book reflect a primary concern with some of the distinctive aspects of industrial technologies in the twentieth century such as the increasing reliance upon science but also the considerable subtlety and complexity of the dialectic between science and technology other concerns include the rapid growth in the development of costs associated with new technologies as well as the difficulty of predicting the eventual performance characteristics of newly emerging technologies

information and intellectual property the global challenges the paper analyses the contribution of golden papers seminal works whose ideas remain as fresh and relevant today as when they were first published decades ago and which continue to dominate academic discourse among successive generations of scholars the authors analyse why two works written within an industrial development context the simple economics of basic scientific research by richard nelson 1959 and kenneth arrows economic welfare and the allocation of resources for invention 1962 are so relevant in today s knowledge driven economic paradigm focusing on the papers application to current global policy debates on information knowledge and intellectual property they argue that while the context has changed the essential nature of innovation driven by widespread access to the ability to replicate and improve remains the same hence a focus on endogenous innovation policy is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago

unbundling the local loop abstract we study competition for high bandwidth services in the telecommunications industry by introducing the possibility of unbundling the local loop where leased lines permit the entrant to provide services without building up its own infrastructure we use a dynamic model of technology adoption and study the incentives of the entrant to lease loops and compete service based and or to build up a new and more efficient infrastructure and compete facility based given the rental price we show that the incumbent sets too low a rental price for its loops hence the entrant adopts the new technology too late from a social welfare perspective the distortion may appear not only on the timing of technology adoption but also on the type quality of the new technology to be adopted we also show that while regulating the rental price may suffice to achieve socially desirable outcomes a sunset clause does not improve social welfare

a critical realist interpretation of evolutionary growth theorising the article discusses a critical realist interpretation of evolutionary growth theorising by focusing on some of its basic characteristics the evolutionary ontology is complex differentiated structured systemic open ever changing and radically uncertain its methodology tends to be increasingly based on appreciative theorising retroductive explanations and interdisciplinary analysis after discussing these features the article suggests that critical realism may indeed constitute an important philosophical and methodological foundation for the future development of evolutionary theories of economic growth

using network analysis to understand public policy for wave energy abstract the uk s wave energy sector is at a pre commercial stage transitioning from prototype demonstration towards a revenue supported industry a host of advantages that could be realised through successful commercialisation include the potential to generate 40 50 twh yr 3 7bn of export and 10 000 jobs by 2020 with tidal despite this criticisms have been made about the lack of coordination between funding bodies communication between stakeholders and overly centralised actors although the value of strong problem solving networks has been noted problems arise in validating the presence nature and value of relationships as well as identification of tacit and informal linkages here network analysis is used to validate these criticisms and provide insight into sector activities it is shown that although high levels of interaction are occurring overall there are wide disparities prime movers are clearly present and less mature developers are isolated from the system as it develops norms and practices this combined with government fund gating has led to a matthew effect whereby some have access to finance and are shaping institutional norms while others struggle although convergence is expected a lack of public sector coordination transparency of decision making and comparability between devices has reduced both investor and stakeholder legitimacy

science parks and regional innovation performance in fiscal austerity era less is more european financial crisis has raised questions about the sustainability and the contribution of innovation anchors especially in southern european countries such as greece this paper utilizes the concept of regional innovation systems riss and introduces a methodological approach that allows for evaluating an science and technology park s stp contribution into the corresponding ris performance taking into consideration 1 the ris idiosyncrasies 2 the dominant role of government expenditures on r d and 3 the underlying complexity of knowledge production and management under alternative sets of restrictions imposed by fiscal consolidation on the preferences of authorities which design and implement science technology and innovation sti policies our framework relies on the estimation of a multi input multi output latent knowledge production function approach and the corresponding efficiency indices data requirements are sourced from the regional innovation scoreboard for the four greek regions and from a small scale case study with respect to the examined regional stp covering the period from 2000 to 2012 the main empirical findings highlight that the contribution of the examined stp in the corresponding ris performance diminishes alongside with the decrease in gerd investment levels with respect to all the efficiency indices these findings are attributed to the structural characteristics of both the ris and the stp under investigation and capture their dependence on managing public financial resources for sti activities

resource abundance and economic growth in the united states abstract it is a common assumption that regions within the same country converge to approximately the same steady state income levels the so called absolute convergence hypothesis focuses on initial income levels to account for the variability in income growth among regions empirical data seem to support the absolute convergence hypothesis for us states but the data also show that natural resource abundance is a significant negative determinant of growth we find that natural resource abundance decreases investment schooling openness and r d expenditure and increases corruption and we show that these effects can fully explain the negative effect of natural resource abundance on growth

unequal uncertainties and uncertain inequalities an axiomatic approach abstract in this paper we provide an axiomatic characterization of social welfare functions for uncertain incomes our most general result is that a small number of reasonable assumptions regarding welfare orderings under uncertainty rule out pure ex ante as well as pure ex post evaluations any social welfare function that satisfies these axioms should lie strictly between the ex ante and the ex post evaluations of income distributions we also provide an axiomatic characterization of the weighted average of the minimum and the maximum of ex post and ex ante evaluations

comparisons of heterogeneous distributions and dominance criteria abstract we are interested in the comparisons of standard of living across societies when observations of both income and household structure are available we generalise the approach of a b atkinson and f bourguignon 1987 3 to the case where the marginal distributions of needs can vary across the household populations under comparison we assume that a sympathetic observer uses a utilitarian social welfare function in order to rank heterogeneous income distributions insofar as any individual can play the role of the observer we take the unanimity point of view according to which the planner s judgements have to comply with a certain number of basic normative principles we impose increasingly restrictive conditions on the household s utility function and we investigate their effects on the resulting rankings of the distributions this leads us to propose four dominance criteria that can be used for providing an unambiguous ranking of income distributions for heterogeneous populations

the resource curse exorcised evidence from a panel of countries abstract this paper evaluates the impact of major natural resource discoveries since 1950 on gdp per capita using panel fixed effects estimation and resource discoveries in countries that were not previously resource rich as a plausibly exogenous source of variation i find a positive effect on gdp per capita levels following resource exploitation that persists in the long term results vary significantly between oecd and non oecd treatment countries with effects concentrated within the non oecd group i further test gdp effects with synthetic control analysis on each individual treated country yielding results consistent with the average effects found with the fixed effects model

the comparison of multi dimensioned distributions of economic status the literature on inequality measurement has been largely concerned with single dimensioned indicators this paper explores some of the issues which arise when there are several dimensions to inequality and these are not readily reduced to a single index concentrating particularly on the two dimensioned case we make use of results on multi variate stochastic dominance in portfolio theory extending these and applying them to the measurement of inequality the use of the dominance conditions is illustrated by an application to the international distribution of income and life expectancy

retrieving and transferring embodied data implications for the management of interdependence within organizations this research helps to link theories of sticky information with organizational design and governance it suggests that information embodied in process material can allow downstream tasks to uncover information about upstream tasks it shows that downstream operators can use this information to negotiate interdependence problems with upstream operators data presented in this article begin to uncover when such information retrieval and exchange occurs and how managers can encourage it finally the article discusses implications for theories of operational design and governance

explaining america s surge in manufactured exports 1880 1913 the united states became a net exporter of manufactured goods around 1910 after a dramatic surge in iron and steel exports began in the mid 1890s this paper argues that natural resource abundance fueled the expansion of iron and steel exports in part by enabling a sharp reduction in the price of u s exports relative to other competitors the commercial exploitation of the mesabi iron ore range for example reduced domestic ore prices by 50 in the mid 1890s and was equivalent to over a decade s worth of industry productivity improvement in its effect on iron and steel export prices the nontradability of american ore resulted in its distinctive impact on the pattern of u s trade the results are consistent with wright s 1990 finding that u s manufactured exports were natural resource intensive at this time

more oil less democracy evidence from worldwide crude oil discoveries this article exploits variations in the timing and size of oil discoveries to identify the impact of oil wealth on democracy i find that discovering 100 billion barrels of oil approximately the initial endowment of iraq pushes a country s democracy level almost 20 percentage points below trend after three decades the estimated effect is larger for oilfields with higher quality oil and lower exploration and extraction costs however the estimates become less precise when oil abundance is measured by oil discovery per capita suggesting politicians may care about the level instead of the per capita value of oil wealth

justifying social discounting the rank discounted utilitarian approach the popular discounted utilitarian criterion for infinite horizon social choice has been criticized on the ground that it treats successive generations unfairly i propose to evaluate intergenerational welfare with a rank discounted utilitarian rdu criterion instead the criterion amounts to discounted utilitarianism on non decreasing paths but it treats all generations impartially discounting becomes the mere expression of intergenerational inequality aversion i show that more inequality averse rdu societies have higher social discount rates when future generations are better off i apply the rdu approach in two benchmark economic growth models and i prove that it promotes sustainable policies maximizing discounted utility

the dynamics of resource based economic development evidence from australia and norway australia and norway have achieved modern levels of development as resource based economies thus avoiding the so called resource curse their ability to achieve this rested heavily on repeated diversification into new resource products and industries these processes relied largely on innovation confirming the close ties that have existed between resource based industries and knowledge producing and disseminating sectors of society we develop a resource based diversification model that analyses the interaction between enabling sectors and resource industries and apply it to the historical experience of the two countries

technological pre adaptation speciation and emergence of new technologies how corning invented and developed fiber optics this article investigates how established firms innovate and even initiate new technological trajectories we build on and expand the notion of technological speciation to describe how a new technology emerges when a firm leverages its technological knowledge into a new application domain current research on technological speciation does not investigate how firms accumulate the technological knowledge which they eventually redeploy into different domains nor does it clarify the precise role of luck historical accidents and foresight strategy in shaping the overall process this requires a finer grained investigation of the microprocesses and evolutionary forces underlying the dynamics of technological speciation to this end we use a longitudinal case study of corning s invention and development of fiber optics technology we focus less on testing theory and more on describing a phenomenon to generate new theoretical insight

the resource curse and its potential reversal several recent papers suggest that the negative association between natural resource intensity and economic growth can be reversed if institutional quality is high enough we try to understand this result in more detail by decomposing the resource measure using alternative measures of both resources and institutions and by studying different time periods while an institutional reversal is present in many specifications only ores and metals interacted with the icrg measure of institutional quality consistently have a negative growth effect but a positive interaction that turns the curse around when institutions are good enough

assessing risky social situations this paper reexamines the welfare economics of risk it singles out a class of criteria the expected equally distributed equivalent as the unique class that avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches such criteria behave like ex post criteria when the final statistical distribution of well being is known ex ante and like ex ante criteria when risk generates no inequality the paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequality aversion and respect of individual ex ante preferences in the vein of harsanyi s aggregation theorem

strategic investments with spillovers vertical integration and foreclosure in the broadband access market abstract we analyse competition between two retailers of broadband access when they differ in their ability to offer value added services one retailer is vertically integrated and controls the input market for local access this firm invests to increase the input quality upgrading to broadband before an access price regulation is set we first show that access price regulation may lower consumer surplus and welfare if retailers do not differ too much second if the integrated firm s ability to offer value added services is much higher than that of the rival the integrated firm uses overinvestment as an alternative foreclosure tool

dynamic access pricing and investment in alternative infrastructures abstract we analyze the impact of access price regulation on the entrants investment in network quality we consider a dynamic framework where developing an alternative infrastructure requires both time and a captive customer base we show that a multi period schedule where regulated access charges rise over time is critical to foster efficient infrastructure investment nonetheless a sunset clause on regulation dilutes investment incentives we also show that in the absence of regulatory commitment the time dependent schedule may not be robust to sequential entry hence to preserve investment by early entrants access charges should depend both on time and the entry period in such a way that each entrant is provided with the same dynamic access conditions the relevance of these issues carries over to the prospective deployment of new access infrastructures the so called next generation access networks

biosecurity bioterrorism and the governance of science the increasing convergence of science and security policy science and security policy are increasingly overlapping because of concerns that legitimate research might be misapplied to develop biological weapons this has led to an expansion of security policy to cover broad areas of research and scientific practice including funding publishing peer review employment materials transfer post graduate teaching and academics ability to design and perform experiments and disseminate research such changes raise policy concerns because many of the technologies used to produce biological weapons are dual use and have legitimate peaceful applications as a result attempts to control their generation diffusion or application can have unintended impacts on socially beneficial applications this paper explores recent changes in the governance of science and technology and contributes to future policy making by assessing the relative merits of understanding the development of dual use policy in terms of either technology transfer or technology convergence 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

socio technical inertia understanding the barriers to electric vehicles it is widely accepted that electrification of the transport sector is one of several technological trajectories that could redress some of the environmental issues associated with the growth in travel demand including climate change and oil demand at a global scale and air quality and noise pollution at the urban scale electric vehicles have been considered a promising technology at repeated intervals over the last century but this promise has not been realised this paper is a contribution to understanding the key tools and strategies that might enable the successful introduction of new technologies and innovations by exploring the key barriers to electric vehicles encountered in two countries uk and germany where the automobile industry has been historically significant the study evaluates stakeholders opinions on relevant regulation infrastructure investment r d incentives and consumer incentives the key findings of the research are that the introduction and penetration of evs is confronted by several barriers that inhibit a larger market penetration under current conditions which in turn casts doubt on the assumptions of strategic niche management and transitions theory

temporary protection and technology adoption evidence from the napoleonic blockade this paper uses a natural experiment to assess whether temporary protection from trade with industrial leaders can foster development of infant industries in follower countries using a new dataset compiled from primary sources i find that in the short run regions departements in the french empire which became better protected from trade with the british for exogenous reasons during the napoleonic wars 1803 15 increased capacity in a new technology mechanised cotton spinning to a larger extent than regions which remained more exposed to trade temporary protection had long term effects in particular by exploiting the fact that the post war location of the cotton industry was determined to a large extent by the historical accident of the wars i first show that the location of cotton spinning within france was persistent and firms located in regions with higher post war spinning capacity were more productive 30 years later second i find that after the restoration of peace exports of cotton goods from france increased substantially consistent with evolving comparative advantage in cottons third i show that as late as 1850 france and belgium both part of the french empire prior to 1815 had larger cotton spinning industries than other continental european countries which were not protected from british trade during the wars this suggests that adoption of the new technology was far from inevitable

inequality aversion and risk aversion this note shows that for two social welfare functions which are inequality averse and anonymous if one is more inequality averse than the other it induces a more risk averse household through optimal sharing than the other we present examples showing that this comparative static can be reversed if either the property of inequality aversion or anonymity is dropped

the long run effects of oil wealth on development evidence from petroleum geology we estimate the long run effects of oil wealth on development by exploiting spatial variation in sedimentary basins areas where petroleum can potentially form instrumental variables estimates indicate that oil production impedes democracy and fiscal capacity development increases corruption and raises gdp per capita without significantly harming the non resource sectors of the economy we find no evidence that oil production increases internal armed conflict coup attempts or political purges in several specifications failure to account for endogeneity leads to substantial underestimation of the adverse effects of oil suggesting that countries with higher quality political institutions and greater fiscal capacity disproportionately select into oil production

oil and democracy endogenous natural resources and the political resource curse by the end of the twentieth century a scholarly consensus emerged around the idea that oil fuels authoritarianism and slow growth the natural abundance once thought to be a blessing was unconditionally and then later only conditionally a curse for political and economic development we re examine the relationship between oil wealth and political regimes challenging the conventional wisdom that such natural resource rents lead to authoritarian outcomes we contend that most efforts to examine the causal linkages between natural resource abundance and political regime have been complicated by the likelihood that both democracy and oil revenue are endogenous to the industrialization processes itself particularly in its developmentalist form our quantitative results based on an analysis of global data from 1970 to 2006 show that both resource endogeneity and several mechanisms of intraregional regime diffusion are powerful determinants of democratic outcomes qualitative evidence from the history of industrialization in latin america yields support for our proposed causal claim oil wealth is not necessarily a curse and may even be a blessing with respect to democratic development