subjective interest rate uncertainty and the macroeconomy a cross country analysis abstract we ask whether uncertainty about interest rates is important for economic activity the effects of interest rate uncertainty on the economy are examined through the lens of a small var where the assumption that uncertainty can affect real activity contemporaneously but not vice versa is indeed in line with the data our measure of uncertainty stems from professional forecasts of short and long term interest rates and accounts for both disagreement among forecasters and the perceived variability of future aggregate shocks studying a panel of countries we find that subjective interest rate uncertainty has large negative and persistent effects on the economy

macroeconomic uncertainty through the lens of professional forecasters abstractwe analyze the evolution of macroeconomic uncertainty in the united states based on the forecast errors of consensus survey forecasts of various economic indicators comprehensive information contained in the survey forecasts enables us to capture a real time measure of uncertainty surrounding subjective forecasts in a simple framework we jointly model and estimate macroeconomic common and indicator specific uncertainties of four indicators using a factor stochastic volatility model our macroeconomic uncertainty estimates have three major spikes has three major spikes aligned with the 1973 1975 1980 and 2007 2009 recessions while other recessions were characterized by increases in indicator specific uncertainties we also show that the selection of data vintages affects the estimates and relative size of jumps in estimated uncertainty series finally our macroeconomic uncertainty has a persistent negative impact on real economic activity rather than producing wait and see dynamics

the impacts of government ideology on innovation what are the main implications abstract this study investigates the relationship between government ideology and technical innovativeness of the whole country by using multinational panel data covering 110 countries from 1995 to 2015 and by employing comprehensive indicators for technical innovation i e trademark and patent application in empirical research we utilize the panel generalized method of moment gmm technique to introduce dynamic variables in order to avoid the bias caused by potential endogeneity next we generate three cross items to examine whether the effect of government ideology on technical innovation differs under different circumstances we then change the measurement of government ideology to assure the reliability of our empirical results further investigate whether the changes of political ideology influence technical innovation and carry out a robustness test by dividing the whole sample into two sub samples based on the level of democracy by employing two samples which limited by 3 main coalition parties in government at most such as re elected government and non alternated government in countries overall the empirical results show that a leftist ruling party inhibits the progress of technical innovation whereas a right wing ruling party promotes the appearance of new technology the effect of government ideology on innovation is not similar under some circumstances more evidence is presented by using two dummy variables to represent left wing and right wing

a survey of agency models of organizations abstract in recent years neoclassical economists have begun to turn their attention to issues of firm organization stimulated in large part by methodological advances in the economics of incentives and incomplete information the paradigm on which much of this work is based views an organization as an agency relationship agency models incorporate two basic features of organizations incomplete information and goal conflict among members of the organization this essay characterizes and critiques the existing research on agency models of organizations in order to broaden the set of consumers of such models and to stimulate the production of new research

technological innovation and the distribution of employment growth a firm level analysis this work studies the firm level relationship between different types of innovative activities and employment growth rates improving on previous investigations on the topic it combines a detailed analysis of the effects of product and process innovation on average employment growth with a broader outlook on the whole conditional employment growth distribution results show that product innovation especially in terms of good new to the entire market has a positive effect on employment growth this role is likely to be particularly relevant for both fast growing and shrinking firms process innovation appears instead to have less clear cut dynamics consistently with existing evidence among different types of process innovation the introduction of novel auxiliary processes appears to be more positively linked with employment growth

uncertainty matters evidence from close elections abstract this paper uses a data rich environment to produce direct econometric estimates of macroeconomic and financial uncertainty for 11 advanced nations these indices exhibit significant independent variation from popular proxies and provide a refinement of the influential work of jurado et al 2015 that results in improved real time performance we use this new data in combination with narrative evidence to jointly identify macro uncertainty and financial shocks macro uncertainty shocks are identified with close elections and financial shocks with financial stress during financial crises we find that macro uncertainty shocks matter for the majority of countries and that the real effects of macro uncertainty shocks are generally larger conditioning on close elections these results are robust to controlling for news shocks and global uncertainty as well as a variety of shocks considered to be important drivers of the business cycle

the evolving impact of global region specific and country specific uncertainty we develop a dynamic factor model with time varying parameters and stochastic volatility estimate it using a large panel of macroeconomic and financial data for 22 countries and decompose the vari

business cycles and long run growth in this survey we discuss the effect of macroeconomic fluctuations on long run growth from both a theoretical and empirical perspective we emphasize the opportunity cost approach which states that firms will intertemporally substitute productivity enhancing activities for regular production activity during recessions we provide aggregate evidence in favor of the opportunity cost approach copyright 1997 by oxford university press

measuring global and country specific uncertainty abstract motivated by the literature on the capital asset pricing model we decompose the uncertainty of a typical forecaster into common and idiosyncratic uncertainty using individual survey data from the consensus forecasts over the period of 1989 2014 we develop monthly measures of macroeconomic uncertainty covering 45 countries and construct a measure of global uncertainty as the weighted average of country specific uncertainties our measure captures perceived uncertainty of market participants and derives from two components that are shown to exhibit strikingly different behavior common uncertainty shocks produce the large and persistent negative response in real economic activity whereas the contributions of idiosyncratic uncertainty shocks are negligible

firm and product life cycles and firm survival on average roughly 5 10 percent of the firms in a given market leave that market over the span of a single year at least so data for a broad range of industries in several economies tell us what is it other than random shocks that determines the probability of survival for a firm in a given market we start by decomposing the forces that affect survival into industry and firm attributes industry attributes we hypothesize encompass variables that exert their influence both over time and across markets the variables that operate over time are defined by the life cycle of the industry life cycles of the industry affect mainly the characteristics of demand and the rate and form of technical change variations across firms we hypothesize arise mainly from learning by doing darwinian survival of the fittest and the obsolescence of initial endowments these variables are linked to the life cycle of the firm how these industry and firm life cycles define patterns of survival is the story

measuring forecast uncertainty by disagreement the missing link using a standard decomposition of forecast errors into common and idiosyncratic shocks we show that aggregate forecast uncertainty can be expressed as the disagreement among the forecasters plus the perceived variability of future aggregate shocks thus the reliability of disagreement as a proxy for uncertainty will be determined by the stability of the forecasting environment and the length of the forecast horizon using density forecasts from the survey of professional forecasters we find direct evidence in support of our hypothesis our results support the use of garch type models rather than the ex post squared errors in consensus forecasts to estimate the ex ante variability of aggregate shocks as a component of aggregate uncertainty copyright 2010 john wiley sons ltd

the impacts of structural oil shocks on macroeconomic uncertainty evidence from a large panel of 45 countries abstract using local projection methods this paper employs monthly panel data from 1989 to 2017 to examine both linear and nonlinear impulse responses of macroeconomic uncertainty to structural shocks to global oil production aggregate demand oil market specific demand and speculative demand in a large group of 45 economies we find that both oil supply and demand shocks are important drivers of uncertainty there is strong evidence that the impacts of oil price shocks on macroeconomic uncertainty are regime dependent and contingent on the states of investor sentiments and perceived volatility in financial markets the responses of economic uncertainty to oil shocks especially demand side shocks appear to experience a dramatic change in the post global financial crisis period

r d and internal finance a panel study of small firms in high tech industries since joseph schumpeter economists have argued that internal finance should be an important determinant of r d expenditures yet almost without exception previous empirical studies have not found evidence of such a relation using newly available data the authors investigate this puzzle with a panel of 179 small firms in high tech industries under each estimation strategy they employ the authors find an economically large and statistically significant relationship between r d investment and internal finance their results are consistent with the view that because of capital market imperfections the flow of internal finance is the principal determinant of the rate at which small high tech firms acquire technology through r d copyright 1994 by mit press

hierarchical design and enforcement of income tax policies abstract a hierarchical model of tax compliance is studied in which the government selects a tax policy and then delegates the responsibility to collect taxes to the irs there is a fixed distribution of income in the economy individuals differ by their income which is known niether to the government nor to the irs we completely characterize the solution to the irs s revenue maximizing problem when taxpayers are risk neutral the optimal auditing policy divides the reported incomes into at most three groups we show that the government provides a smaller budget to the irs than the irs would wish

heterogeneous preferences and new innovation cycles in mature industries the amateur camera industry 1955 1974 this paper examines the amateur camera industry between 1955 and 1974 the case raises important issues for our understanding of the product lifecycle first an industry can experience more than one round of radical product and process innovation in its history second there is not a strict sequence of product innovation followed by process innovation third the existence of a dominant design depends on there being a relatively homogeneous set of consumers heterogeneous consumer preferences support different camera designs in two distinct market niches in the amateur camera industry fourth new rounds of entry and exit and new industry shake outs can occur with new innovative entrants displacing old firms fifth when the new firms are from developing countries a shift in global production occurs the success of new japanese entrants in this period lay in their being more successful innovators not in their exploiting wage cost advantages

incumbent entry into new market niches the role of experience and managerial choice in the creation of dynamic capabilities increasingly technological innovation creates markets for new products and services to survive firms must respond to these new markets how do firms develop the capabilities necessary to succeed in such changing conditions some suggest that experience with previous entry builds such capabilities others suggest that capabilities arise from experience producing and selling to existing markets the role of managers is also debated some argue that experience with existing markets causes managers to miss entry opportunities others argue that managers enter new markets when their firm possesses the experience needed to compete effectively in this paper we explore these issues by investigating entry patterns in the disk drive industry we investigate the effect of experience in existing markets and experience with previous market entry we find that experience in previous markets increased the probability that a firm would enter a new market we show that this experience had greater value if the firm entered the new market we infer that managers chose to enter these markets to obtain this increase in value

job polarization in europe the structure of employment is always changing and economists are always trying to understand those changes in the 1990s the idea of skill biased technological change sbtc was used to understand the shift in employment toward more educated workers see david h autor and lawrence f katz 1999 for a survey however in recent years it has become appar ent that a more nuanced approach is needed the idea of sbtc might lead one to predict a uni form shift in employment away from low skilled and toward high skilled occupations but studies for the united states autor katz and melissa s kearney 2006 and the united kingdom goos and manning 2007 have shown that there is growth in employment in both the high est skilled professional and managerial and lowest skilled personal services occupations with declining employment in the middle of the distribution manufacturing and routine office jobs this is what goos and manning 2007 term job polarization although see the introduc tion to goos and manning 2007 for antecedents of these ideas there are several hypotheses about the rea sons for job polarization first the routiniza tion hypothesis first put forward by autor frank levy and richard murnane 2003 sug gests that the effect of technological progress is to replace routine labor which tends to be clerical and craft jobs in the middle of the wage distribution second there is the view that globalization in general and offshoring in par ticular is an important source of change in the job structure in the richest countries see for example alan s blinder 2007 third there may be a link between job polarization and

the international effects of global financial uncertainty shocks abstract in this paper we study the impact of sudden rises in global financial uncertainty on small open economies to this end we extract a global factor from the realised volatilities of about 1000 risky asset returns from around the world we then analyse how shocks to this factor affect economic activity in 44 advanced and emerging small open economies by estimating local projections in a panel regression framework we find that shocks increasing global financial uncertainty have adverse consequences on output trade and unemployment while their impact on nominal variables is more heterogeneous across countries furthermore the effects are more severe in countries with a higher degree of trade or financial openness higher levels of vulnerabilities weaker institutions or during economic downturns

the medium term effect of r d on firm growth this study analyses the effect of r d expenditure on firm employment growth in the medium term using six cross sectional waves of an innovation survey conducted in the netherlands in all sectors the analysis is focused on firms having positive r d expenditure and investigates whether higher investments in r d in proportion to firm turnover translate into higher medium term growth rates comparisons with growth on a shorter term are conducted by following the firm size evolution since the r d investment for five consecutive years and allowing for firm exit at all time terms quantile regression techniques indicate that a higher r d has a positive effect on high growers and allows a higher number of firms to be high growers still once a firm invests in r d even if a higher investment makes the firm more likely to have a very good performance it does not make it less likely to have a bad one

impacts of innovation export and other factors on firm employment growth in chinese manufacturing industries this article presents empirical evidence on the impacts of product innovation export and other important factors on employment growth in chinese manufacturing industries over the period 2000 2006 the results of our analysis show that the overall demand effect of firms output growth on their average yearly employment growth amounts to 7 0 of which 3 5 1 2 1 6 and 0 7 correspond to the output growth of respectively domestic old export old domestic new and export new products the displacement effect from process and organizational innovations as measured by firms productivity efforts to catch up with industry regional productivity frontiers accounts for a 5 4 average reduction of yearly employment growth we also observe a trade off between growth of productivity and growth of employment which could have been on average higher by 2 for productivity 16 8 instead of 14 8 and lower by 2 for employment 1 4 instead of 3 4

the effect of recessions on firms boundaries the economic theory of the firm offers conflicting predictions of how the two major effects of recessions changes in demand and access to credit affect firm boundaries using data on norwegian firms in the recent recession we find support for both increased and reduced vertical integration of core activities in response to a recessionary shock further we find a negative interaction effect between reductions in access to credit and reductions in demand on insourcing of core activities but no such effect on outsourcing of core activities we argue that this finding may highlight a possible explanation for the conflicting theoretical predictions regarding vertical integration in response to demand and credit shocks

optimal monitoring policies in agencies this article considers a principal agent problem in which the principal has access to a costly monitoring technology that can be used to acquire additional information about the agent s actions subsequent to observing the agent s output although randomized monitoring policies are feasible we show that in a variety of contexts optimal monitoring policies are deterministic and lower tailed that is there exists some critical level of output such that further investigation of the agent s actions occurs if and only if output falls below this critical level

quantile estimates of the impact of r d intensity on firm performance this paper investigates the relationship between initial research and development r d intensity and firm growth using a unique data set for firms with r d activities in austria during the period 1995 2006 results based on the least absolute deviation lad estimator show that initial r d intensity has a positive and significant impact on both employment and sales growth in the subsequent 2 years quantile regressions for each cross section reveal that the impact of r d intensity is significant from 0 3 to the highest quantile of the conditional distribution of employment growth furthermore the elasticity of employment growth with respect to r d intensity is highest for firms at or slightly below the median of the distribution of firm growth finally we find that the impact of r d decreases significantly over time

innovation and firm growth does firm age play a role this paper explores the relationship between innovation and firm growth for firms of different ages we hypothesize that young firms undertake riskier innovation activities which may have greater performance benefits if successful or greater losses if unsuccessful using an extensive spanish community innovation survey sample for the period 2004 2012 we apply panel quantile regressions to study the effect of r d activities on firm growth i e sales growth productivity growth and employment growth our results show that young firms face larger performance benefits from r d at the upper quantiles of the growth rate distribution but face larger decline at the lower quantiles r d investment by young firms therefore appears to significantly riskier than r d investment by more mature firms which suggests some policy implications

r d and employment an application of the lsdvc estimator using european microdata abstract the job creation effect of business r d is tested applying the dynamic lsdvc estimator to a longitudinal database covering 677 european companies over the period 1990 2008 job creation is detected in services and high tech manufacturing but not in traditional sectors

the impact of technological and organizational innovations on employment in european firms by using firm level data provided by the fourth community innovation survey cis4 for a selected number of eu countries this article explores the employment impact of innovation extending the analysis to organizational change the empirical evidence presented shows that both technological and organizational innovation exert a positive impact on employment mainly indirectly that is by improving growth performances in firms the strength of these indirect effects have been found to vary across different types of innovations despite the limits imposed by data at our disposal the evidence presented seems to somewhat diminish the relevance of the labor displacing effects of the process innovation the latter being strong and clearly visible only within the manufacturing industry and only when process innovations are combined with organizational changes copyright 2012 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

innovation and employment an introduction the eight papers of this icc special section address the relationships between innovation of different kinds related to products processes or organizational arrangements in their effects on job creation and job destruction at the level of both firm and whole sectors in a wide range of countries from all continents except north america and oceania the evidence suggests that product innovation as such does not lead to job destruction but possibly to a polarization of jobs the effects of process innovation are more controversial at a purely firm level a significant negative effect on employment is often absent however this does not rule out the possibility of industry wide labor shedding outcomes finally the evidence so far suggests that a driver of employment dynamics in western advanced economies much more powerful than the patterns of innovation has been exerted by globalization and offshoring to competition from emerging economies like china

productivity growth and the structure of the business cycle abstract over the recent years opportunity cost oc models of growth have argued that recessions are times when firms engage in productivity improving activities because of intertemporal substitu tion this paper tests whether this approach is correct the technique used to disentangle the trend from the cycle is semi structural vector autoregression the results are mildly supportive of the oc theory there tends to be a negative impact of demand shocks on productivity both in the short run and in the long run and the short run impact is stronger in those countries where fluctuations are more transitory however there is no significant response of r d to demand shocks

r d subsidies and productivity in smes this paper examines the effect of r d subsidies on labour productivity we use firm level data on finnish smes from 2000 to 2012 and apply a combined matching and difference in differences method to control for selection bias we find no significant positive effect on labour productivity over the five year period after a subsidy is granted however the results vary over time and indicate a 2 4 negative effect on smes annual productivity growth one to 2 years after the subsidy year nevertheless subsidies generate a positive employment effect and enhance firm survival additional scrutiny reveals that subsidies positively affect the human capital level of low skill firms

explaining the distribution of firm growth rates empirical analyses on aggregated datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of corporate growth rates we present clear cut evidence on this topic using disaggregated data we explain the observed regularities proposing a model in which firms ability to take up new business opportunities increases with the number of opportunities already exploited a theoretical result is presented for the limiting case in which the number of firms and opportunities go to infinity moreover using simulations we show that even in a small industry the agreement with asymptotic results is almost complete

what percentage of innovations are patented empirical estimates for european firms abstract a 1993 survey on the innovative activities of europe s largest industrial firms obtained useable results on patenting activities for 604 respondents the data are used to calculate the sales weighted propensity rates for 19 industries the propensity rates equal the percentage of innovations for which a patent application is made the propensity rates for product innovations average 35 9 varying between 8 1 in textiles and 79 2 in pharmaceuticals the average for process innovations is 24 8 varying from 8 1 in textiles to 46 8 for precision instruments only four sectors have patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations combined that exceed 50 pharmaceuticals chemicals machinery and precision instruments regression results that control for the effect of industry sector show that patent propensity rates increase with firm size and are higher among firms that find patents to be an important method for preventing competitors from copying both product and process innovations the effect of secrecy is not so straightforward firms that find secrecy to be an important protection method for product innovations are less likely to patent as expected but secrecy has little effect on the propensity to patent process innovations the r d intensity of the firm has no effect on patent propensity rates for both product and process innovations the sector of activity has a strong influence on product patent propensities but very little effect on process patent propensities after controlling for the effect of other factors

innovation and employment a firm level analysis with european r d scoreboard data abstract this article analyzes the microeconomic relation between innovation and employment using company data from r d scoreboard for europe covering 2000 2008 a reduced form equation in which r d can account for both product and process innovation is estimated the existence of non constant elasticities is assessed due to the combination of efficient scale and decreasing return to r d in our empirical estimates the scale effect tends to prevail for a given r d intensity generating an increasing relation between total turnover and employment these results have important implications for policymakers innovation supporting policies should be correctly tailored and monitored since the results depend on the characteristics of the benefiting firms moreover r d intensity on gdp should be managed with care if taken as a policy target given that the denominator is endogenous and non linearly dependent on research expenditure

the persistence of shocks to profitability in this study we use data for 1981 through 1994 on a large sample of u s companies to examine the persistence of incremental industry corporate parent and business specific effects on profitability our results indicate that the incremental effects of industry on profitability persist longer than the incremental effects of the corporate parent and of the specific business changes in industry structure have a more persistent impact on profitability than do changes in firm structure

effects of innovation on employment a dynamic panel analysis abstract this paper estimates the effect of innovation on employment at the firm level our uniquely long innovation panel data set of german manufacturing firms covers more than 20 years and allows us to use various innovation measures we can distinguish between product and process innovations as well as between innovation input and innovation output measures using dynamic panel gmm system estimation we find positive effects of innovation on employment this is true for innovation input as well as for innovation output variables innovations show their positive effect on employment with a time lag and process innovations have higher effects than product innovations

the influence of industry downturns on the propensity of product versus process innovation this article sheds light on how industry fluctuations affect firms propensity to innovate we test two seemingly conflicting arguments that suggest how firms are more or less inclined to engage in innovation activities during industry fluctuations by studying a panel of 622 italian manufacturing firms during the period 1995 2003 we show how differentiating between product and process innovation may help reconcile the theory of opportunity cost of innovation with the cash flow effect argument we find that industry downturns are related to product and process innovation in different ways firms tend to invest in product innovation rather than process innovation in downturns the findings have implications for both theory showing when the opportunity cost of innovation dominates and research design showing the importance of both the input and output measures in innovation studies and how they might influence the results

employment innovation and productivity evidence from italian microdata italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their european competitors this paper presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor performance we use firm level data from the last three surveys on italian manufacturing firms conducted by mediocredito capitalia which cover the period 1995 2003 using a modified version of the model proposed by harrison jaumandreu mairesse and peters 2005 which separates employment growth rates into those associated with old and new products we provide robust evidence that there is no employment displacement effect stemming from process innovation the sources of employment growth during the period are split equally between the net contribution of product innovation and the net contribution from sales growth of old products however the contribution of product innovation is somewhat lower than that for the four comparison european countries considered by harrison et al

samurai accountant a theory of auditing and plunder a risk neutral principal wishes to exact a payment from a risk neutral agent whose wealth he does not know but may verify through a costly auditing procedure we characterize efficient schemes for the principal when he is allowed to choose schedules for preaudit and postaudit payments and audit probabilities subject to the constraint that only monetary incentives can be used and that the principal may never make a net payment to the agent the main results are that efficient schemes involve preaudit payments which are increasing in the agent s wealth audit probabilities are decreasing in the agent s wealth and also satisfy certain constraints as equalities in general such schemes involve stochastic auditing and rebates after an audit in this paper we analyse the problem of a principal extracting wealth from an agent who is reluctant to part with it and is also better informed than the principal as to the amount he owns we assume that the principal has a costly means of discovering the agent s

macroeconomic uncertainty indices based on nowcast and forecast error distributions abstract we propose new indices to measure macroeconomic uncertainty the indices measure how unexpected a realization of a representative macroeconomic variable is relative to the unconditional fo

forecast uncertainty ex ante and ex post u s inflation and output growth survey respondents who make point predictions and histogram forecasts of macro variables reveal both how uncertain they believe the future to be ex ante as well as their ex post performance macroeconomic forecasters tend to be overconfident at horizons of a year or more but overestimate i e are underconfident regarding the uncertainty surrounding their predictions at short horizons ex ante uncertainty remains at a high level compared to the ex post measure as the forecast horizon shortens there is little evidence of a link between individuals ex post forecast accuracy and their ex ante subjective assessments

how does financial development alter the impact of uncertainty abstract how does the impact of uncertainty on output vary with financial development levels we investigate this question empirically using a quarterly panel data set of 50 countries between 1971 and 2009 and an instrumental variables model the results support the conjecture that financial development mitigates the negative impact of uncertainty on output at the lower end of the distribution of the financial development levels one standard deviation increase in uncertainty decreases output by more than two standard deviations at the higher end of financial development the impact on output is statistically insignificant these results suggest that strengthening the financial system and increasing liquidity and credit availability improce the robustness of growth performance during periods of uncertainty

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

estimates of the value of patent rights in european countries during the post 1950 period this paper examines the distribution of the values of patent rights in the united kingdom france and germany during the post 1950 period these values are inferred from the behavior of patentees with respect to payment of renewal fees on their patents a simple economic model of renewal decisions is combined with data on the proportion of patents renewed at alternative ages and the renewal fee schedules to produce estimates of the distribution and the total value of patent rights in these countries moreover the data indicate that there have been changes in the value distribution and we follow these changes over the period the empirical results of particular interest concern the total value of patent rights and the relationship between changes in it and changes in the quantity of patents the skew in the distribution of patent values and the rate of obsolescence on the returns to patents

employment and technological innovation evidence from u k manufacturing firms this article uses british firm level panel data on actual innovative activity drawn from different statistical sources to identify the effect of technical change on jobs previous work tends to find positive associations of proxies for technical change and employment but such studies suffer from various statistical drawbacks in this study even when one controls for fixed effects dynamics and endogeneity innovations have a positive and significant effect on employment which persists over several years there seems to be little direct role for spillover effects from industry innovations or any role for industry wages or union power

credit intermediation and the transmission of macro financial uncertainty international evidence abstract this paper introduces a novel measure of global macro financial uncertainty and examines the state dependent transmission of uncertainty to economic activity we show that global uncertainty shocks have adverse and nonlinear macroeconomic effects with the nonlinearity being driven by different levels of country specific banking sector distress both macroeconomic and financial market uncertainty are associated with lower economic activity with the latter exerting stronger effects the state dependency of the effect is prevalent in both cases our findings have important policy implications highlighting both the state of the banking sector as well as the origin of uncertainty as crucial factors in the transmission of uncertainty

the greener the better job creation effects of environmentally friendly technological change this article investigates the link between environment related innovation and job creation at firm level employing italian data on 4507 manufacturing firms matched with patent records for the period 2001 2008 we test whether green innovation measured by the number of environment related patents has a positive effect on long run employment growth that is specific with respect to non environmental innovation results show a strong positive impact of green innovation on long run job creation substantially bigger than the effect of other innovations our findings are robust to a number of additional tests including controls for patents quality and cost differential between generic and green innovation and endogeneity

the implications of central bank transparency for uncertainty and disagreement abstract using survey data from 25 economies we provide evidence that greater transparency surrounding monetary policy reduces uncertainty of interest rates and inflation primarily by reducing uncertainty that is common to agents rather than disagreement between agents this suggests that studies that focus on disagreement as a proxy for uncertainty understate the benefits of monetary policy transparency the adoption of inflation targets and forward guidance are both associated with lower uncertainty although inflation targets have a stronger impact on reducing uncertainty than forward guidance moreover there are diminishing benefits from ever higher levels of transparency taken as a whole our results support the contention that clarity of communication is as important as the magnitude of transparency

the life cycle of a competitive industry firm numbers first rise then later fall as an industry evolves this nonmonotonicity is explained using a competitive model in which innovation opportunities fuel entry and relative failure to innovate prompts exit equilibrium time paths for price and quantity also share features of the data the model is estimated using data from the u s automobile tire industry a particularly dramatic example of the nonmonotonicity in firm numbers

r d innovation and productivity new evidence from italian manufacturing microdata italian manufacturing firms have been losing ground with respect to many of their european competitors this article presents some empirical evidence on the effects of innovation on employment growth and therefore on firms productivity with the goal of understanding the roots of such poor performance we use firm level data from the last three surveys on italian manufacturing firms conducted by mediocredito capitalia which cover the period 1995 2003 using a slightly modified version of the model proposed by harrison jaumandreu mairesse and peters harrison et al 2005 which separates employment growth rates into those associated with old and new products we find no evidence of significant employment displacement effects stemming from process innovation the sources of employment growth during the period are split equally between the net contribution of product innovation and the net contribution from sales growth of old products however the contribution of product innovation to employment growth is somewhat lower than in the four european countries considered in harrison et al 2005 and the contribution of innovation in general to productivity growth is almost nil in italy during this period

environmental innovation and employment dynamics in different technology fields an analysis based on the german community innovation survey 2009 the employment effects of environmental technologies are in the focus of politicians but studies analyzing these effects for different environmental innovation fields are rare we use the 2009 wave of the community innovation survey cis allowing for such an analysis at the firm level our econometric analysis shows that innovative firms in general are characterized by a significantly more dynamic employment development especially the introduction of cleaner technologies as process innovations leads to a higher employment within the firm the theoretical background of this finding is that cost savings induced by this type of process innovation improve the competitiveness of firms this has positive effects on demand and thus also increases employment especially material and energy savings are positively correlated to employment because they help to increase the profitability and competitiveness of the firm on the other side air and water process innovations that are still dominated by end of pipe technologies have a negative impact on employment

stochastic monitoring and moral hazard the phenomenon of monitoring subordinates actions and local environments so commonly observed in large firms is an attempt to alleviate the moral hazard problem induced by central managers principals being unable to costlessly observe subordinates agents actions and the state of their environment these monitoring activities take many forms and are generally performed in a stochastic manner for example supervisors make surprise checks on workers and investigations are often triggered by standard cost variance reports the information gathered from monitoring activities is used to penalize or reward subordinates agents thus altering their incentives and behavior it is intuitively clear that the monitoring policy that will be employed depends upon the contract to be enforced in a sense every type of contract has both benefits and associated monitoring costs the purpose of this paper is to study the simultaneous optimal choice of contracts and stochastic monitoring policies in a single period principal agent paradigm townsend 1979 first studied monitoring or verification in the context of a simple trading economy where the endowments of consumers were stochastic and known only to themselves however in townsend s analysis verification policies were constrained to be deterministic that is states were verified with probability one or not at all with deterministic verification townsend found that in the nondegenerate case unfavorable outcomes were verified and more favorable outcomes were

innovative activity over the business cycle this paper examines cyclical patterns of innovative activity in the united kingdom over the period 1948 83 innovative activity turns out to have many of the properties of a random walk but does show a tendency to cluster during booms there is clear evidence of a long term secular relation between the level of innovative activity and the level of economic activity although this may have changed in the 1980s finally the data provide no reason for thinking that these clusters of innovation cause cyclic variations in economic activity but variations in economic activity do granger cause changes in innovative activity copyright 1995 by royal economic society