campaign contributions and congressional voting a simultaneous probit tobit model m any citizens and scholars have been troubled by the influence that special interest groups appear to exert over policymaking as a result of their roles in the financing of political campaigns these concerns inspired the enactment of a number of election law reforms in the 1970s and have led to increasing popular support for public financing of electoral campaigns despite the public attention these issues have attracted few social scientists have attempted to analyze the financial relationships between interest groups and policymakers empirically 1 one such study was reported by durden and silberman 1976 who included contributions from the afl cio political action committee as an independent variable in an equation explaining congressional voting on minimum wage legislation their results indicated that campaign contributions significantly affected voting on that issue the work i have done differs substantially from that of durden and silberman in two ways first i have chosen to examine issues which were of considerably narrower concern than the minimum wage issue in the interest of simplicity i examine issues of concern to just one or a few groups i have also used a different econometric technique if campaign contributions are actually endogenous as seems plausible the single equation estimation technique employed by durden and silberman is subject to a possible simultaneous equations bias for each issue studied i have therefore jointly estimated a two equation system explaining both votes on the bill and contributions from an associated interest group the simultaneous probit tobit model which i use takes into account the dichotomous nature of the variable indicating a congressman s vote the non negativity constraint imposed on the contribution variable and the possibility of correlation between the error terms for the equations explaining these two variables 2 full information maximum likelihood fiml estimates for the model are consistent and asymptotically efficient

what makes basic research economically useful abstract economic analysis has helped us understand the strong economic dimension in the explosive growth of science and more recently the reasons for continuing public subsidies however the growing domination of the market failure approach has led to the analytical neglect of two major questions for policy makers how does science contribute to technology are the technological benefits from science increasingly becoming international on the former too much attention has been devoted to the relatively narrow range of scientific fields producing knowledge with direct technological applications and too little to the much broader range of fields the skills of which contribute to most technologies on the latter national systems of science and of technology remain closely coupled in most major countries in spite of the technological activities of large multinational firms empirical research is needed on concentration scale and efficiency in the performance of basic research where techniques and insights from the applied economics of industrial r d are of considerable relevance there is no convincing evidence so far of unexploited economies of scale in basic research this evidence shows that many policies for greater selectivity and concentration in basic research have been misconceived economists and other social scientists could help by formulating more persuasive justifications for public subsidy for basic research and by making more realistic assumptions about the nature of science and technology

public policies pressure groups and dead weight costs abstract this paper presents a model of competition among special interest groups for political influence each active group exerts pressure to affect its taxes and subsidies where activities of different groups are related by the equality between total tax collections and total tax subsidies the dead weight costs and benefits of taxes and subsidies play a major role in our model an increase in the dead weight cost of taxation encourages pressure by taxpayers while an increase in the dead weight costs of subsidies discourages pressure by recipients various applications of the analysis are discussed

two faces effects of business groups on innovation in emerging economies this paper shows that business groups in emerging economies exert dual effects on innovation while groups facilitate innovation by providing institutional infrastructure groups also discourage innovation by creating entry barriers for nongroup firms and thereby inhibit the proliferation of new ideas this pattern reflects an evolutionary process in which the interplay of the availability of innovation infrastructure and variety of ideas influences the level of innovation in an industry we show that group market share has an inverted u impact on innovation in industrial sectors of both korea and taiwan during the 1981 1995 period institutional differences between korea and taiwan in terms of market structure and industrial policies lead to different innovation thresholds the point at which the marginal costs of increasing group share begin to dominate the marginal benefits in the two countries

fiscal policy with agents differing in altruism and ability this paper presents an overlapping generations model of growth with individuals differing in productivity and altruism within such a model wealth is entirely held in the steady state by the families with the highest degree of altruism we then look at the macroeconomic and distributive effects of three fiscal policies public debt pay as you go social security and estate taxation under plausible assumption we show that both public debt and social security are neutral a la ricardo but increase inequality we also show that a estate taxation can be pareto worsening even though it can foster income equality

trickle down consumption financial deregulation inequality and indebtedness over the last thirty years the u s experienced a surge in income inequality coupled with increasing levels of borrowing we model an olg economy populated by two types of household that care about how their consumption compares to that of their peers in this framework individual debt to income ratios decrease with income increases in consumption of rich households lead to increases in consumption of the rest and aggregate borrowing increases with income inequality we calibrate our model to evaluate the welfare implications of the process of nancial liberalization that began in the 1980s our analysis suggests that some of the nancial developments that lead to the recent expansion of credit may have decreased rather than increased welfare

status effects public goods provision and excess burden abstract most studies of the optimal provision of public goods or the excess burden from taxation assume that individual utility is independent of other individuals consumption this paper investigates public good provision and excess burden in a model that allows for interdependence in consumption in the form of status relative consumption effects in the presence of such effects consumption and labor taxes no longer are pure distortionary taxes but have a corrective tax element that addresses an externality from consumption as a result the marginal excess burden of consumption taxes is lower than in the absence of status effects and will be negative if the consumption tax rate is below the pigouvian rate correspondingly when consumption or labor tax rates are below the pigouvian rate the second best level of public goods provision is above the first best level contrary to findings from models without status effects for plausible functional forms and parameters relating to status effects the marginal excess burden from existing u s labor taxes is substantially lower than in most prior studies and is negative in some cases

a comparative study of u s and japanese patent systems in an era of global competition adequate protection of intellectual property in triad regions of the world particularly in japan has become increasingly important this study focuses on the differences and similarities in patent practices between japan and the united states british and german patent practices are also examined to offer a balanced comparison findings indicate that the japanese patent practices seem to discriminate against foreign applicants with longer pendency periods than for domestic applicants while the u s german and british patent practices appear to discriminate against foreign applicants with lower patent grant ratios than for domestic applicants

measuring innovative performance is there an advantage in using multiple indicators abstract the innovative performance of companies has been studied quite extensively and for a long period of time however the results of many studies have not yet led to a generally accepted indicator of innovative performance or a common set of indicators so far the variety in terms of constructs measurements samples industries and countries has been substantial this paper studies the innovative performance of a large international sample of nearly 1200 companies in four high tech industries using a variety of indicators these indicators range from r d inputs patent counts and patent citations to new product announcements the study establishes that a composite construct based on these four indicators clearly catches a latent variable innovative performance however our findings also suggest that the statistical overlap between these indicators is that strong that future research might also consider using any of these indicators to measure the innovative performance of companies in high tech industries

fiscal policy in a growth model with both altruistic and nonaltruistic agents this paper examines the long run behavior of an overlapping generations model with a population consisting of altruistic and nonaltruistic agents it also studies the effect of fiscal policy on aggregate capital accumulation and on the welfare of both types of agents it shows that an increase in the relative number of nonaltruists is pareto improving in the steady state it also shows that the introduction of public debt or unfunded social security has no effect on the longrun equilibrium but implies a transfer of resources from the nonaltruistic to the altruistic agents finally it indicates that inheritance taxation hurts not only the altruists but also the nonaltruists

bottom up estimation of industrial and public r d investment by technology in support of policy making the case of selected low carbon energy technologies abstract this paper discusses a bottom up approach to estimate the level of r d investment by technology in areas where data are scarce it develops a four step methodology for the estimation of corporate r d investments at technology level this approach can overcome gaps in existing data by combining publicly available information in a novel way even though it introduces some uncertainty this is illustrated for a set of low carbon energy technologies that were identified as key for meeting europe s long term energy and climate objectives by the european strategic energy technology plan the paper finds that the aggregated r d investments dedicated to these technologies amounted to 3 3 billion in the eu in 2007 including public funding from european union member states and at eu level and industrial research activities from companies with headquarters registered in the eu the results allow conclusions on the european energy research policy to be drawn such as the dominance of industrial funds and have provided significant input to the european policy making in this field the paper ends with suggestions on how to further enhance the accuracy of the approach and how to widen its application to other sectors

dynamics of china s provincial level specialization in strategic emerging industries this paper examines the dynamics of technological specialization in strategic emerging industries seis within each of mainland china s 31 provinces and the likely effectiveness based on the experiences of taiwan and south korea of the provinces strategies for developing these industries grounded in economic decentralization theories the empirical method employed includes analyzing the scores on an sei specialization promotion index per each province alongside several analytics of invention patent data from each province in the seven seis newly designated by the central level government as of 2010 the data is quantitatively analyzed according to four groups of indicators based on the following specialization relevant concepts comparative advantages and technological capabilities economy size and income technological uncertainty and lifecycles and latecomer entry into complex technologies where knowledge is most cumulative the analysis finds that china s system of economic decentralization has partially worked to ensure provincial industrial policymaking is effective whereby a notable number of provinces are seemingly pursuing sei development strategies in terms of sei selection and promotion that may enable catch up however paradoxically at the same time the system appears to sometimes facilitate provincial sei development strategies that are quite risky or even likely ineffective

industrial research as a source of important patents abstract it has been recently observed that in the light of concepts like lean management shortening of development times business reengineering or shareholder value companies have substantially cut down their expenditures for research since research is by definition primarily aimed at the broadening of technological knowledge rather than the development of products or processes which find immediate commercial applications the benefits of research are not apparent and hence the allocation of funds to research appears to be unjustified based on data from 25 european and japanese electronics companies we examined the relationship between corporate spending on research and patenting output since patent applications only measure the overall level of r d activity they were differentiated according to their quality in order to assess the technological and commercial impact of r d activities it is found that those companies which spend a high share of their r d expenditures on research hold patents of relatively higher quality furthermore differences between european and japanese companies with respect to research spending and patent positions are identified the results lead to the conclusion that research obviously serves as a base for those inventions which are of higher technological and commercial importance thus the investment in research appears to be of great value for the competitiveness and should therefore not be neglected

the propensity to patent abstract this paper analyzes the relationship between 1974 rd among the exceptions the tendency was toward diminishing returns variables measuring overseas sales federal r d support diversification scope of invention use and invention type had only modest explanatory power there was no significant evidence of disproportionate patent accumulation in the more highly concentrated industries

optimal taxation when consumers have endogenous benchmark levels of consumption i examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer s utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others the benchmark level of consumption as well as on the level of the consumer s own consumption the socially optimal balanced growth path is characterized by the modi ed golden rule and by a condition on the intergenerational allocation of consumption in each period a competitive economy can be induced to attain the social optimum by a lump sum pay as you go social security system and a tax on capital income

the obsession for competitiveness and its impact on statistics the construction of high technology indicators abstract high technology is a concept much in vogue in oecd countries for it is a symbol of an advanced economy this paper looks at why and how the concept and its indicator acquired such fame it explains that the reason has to do with the fact that the indicator emerged in the context of debates on the competitiveness of countries and their efforts to maintain or improve their positions in world trade the first part looks at the early statistics behind the indicator r d sales statistics developed in official analyses of industrial r d surveys before the 1950s the second part traces the evolution of the r d sales ratio in the 1960s through its use as an indicator of research or technological intensity the third part discusses the internationalization of the indicator via the oecd

patents as indicators of corporate technological strength abstract quantitative indicators of the technological strengths of individual companies would be an important addition to the financial and economic data used in competitor assessments merger acquisition analyses investment decisions and corporate planning and management this paper examines the links between corporate patent and patent citation data and several other indicators of corporate performance changes in sales and profits research and development budgets scientific productivity and expert opinions of company technological strength the study covers 17 us pharmaceutical companies for which financial r d and expert opinion data were readily available for these pharmaceutical companies it was found that the patent data are an excellent indicator of overall corporate technological strength with 1 an overall correlation of 0 82 between expert opinion of pharmaceutical company technical strength and the number of us patents granted to the companies and 2 correlations in the general range of 0 6 to 0 9 between increases in company profits and sales and both patent citation frequency and concentration of company patents within a few patent classes

financial globalization inequality and the rising public debt abstract during the last three decades government debt has increased in most developed countries during the same period we have also observed a significant liberalization of international financial markets we propose a multicountry model with incomplete markets and show that governments may choose higher levels of debt when financial markets become internationally integrated we also show that public debt increases with the volatility of uninsurable income idiosyncratic risk to the extent that the increase in income inequality observed in some industrialized countries has been associated with higher idiosyncratic risk the paper suggests another potential mechanism for the rise in public debt jel d31 e62 f65 h63

the role of technology in market shares dynamics the paper presents the estimation of an empirical model of market share dynamics for five industrialized countries and 18 industries the emphasis is put on the importance of non price factors of competitiveness whereas most traditional explanations rest on the influence of relative prices among the former type of factor the role of variables reflecting technological advantage is privileged in particular the role of innovations has received considerable attention in the literature on international trade as well as the literature on endogenous growth in this spirit the paper introduces patent counts and investment as explanatory variables for the export market share the results show that non price variables have an important impact on the determinations of long run competitiveness

the rate and motives of the internationalisation of large firm r d 1994 2005 towards a turning point this paper addresses the internationalisation of rd and iii a rapid rise but still limited of asian firm r d internationalisation third these movements did not promote as anticipated the role of technology based motives asset augmenting strategies in the internationalisation of large firms r d technology based motives remain the most important of driver but the gap with market based considerations has narrowed

the transformation of competitive advantage in east asia an analysis of technological and trade specialisation summary in recent years there has been considerable interest in the relationship between a country s export competitiveness and the role played by technology in strengthening and maintaining competitive advantage a central feature of recent empirical work mainly focused on the oecd countries has rested on examining patterns of export and technological specialization between economies and sectors this paper moves attention away from the advanced industrialized economies to examine the trends for trade and technological specialization among the east asian developing economies in particular two aspects of specialization are examined first to what extent have patterns of competitive advantage changed over time and second to measure the relationship between patterns of trade and technological specialization important differences are found in the patterns of specialization and in the relationship between them among the advanced east asian economies and those catching up

the globalisation of technology a new taxonomy book synopsis international management of research and development brings together the most influential contributions to managing organising and coordinating r d and innovation on a global scale in addition to papers on the fundamental principles trends and drivers of international r d it covers strategies and operations of global r d it also provides an introduction to modern concepts such as knowledge networks open innovation and virtual innovation it is a key reference collection for professors researchers and practitioners

the intersection of business state government and special interests in federal legislation an examination of congressional votes on the road to interstate branching i introduction over the past 50 years economists have developed the theory of legislative decision making based on utility maximization the theory models the legislator s responses to constituent demands the empirical verification of this economic theory began in the 1970s and continues today this article contributes to the literature on voting behavior silberman and durden 1976 examined the 1973 votes to amend the fair labor standards act their analysis of minimum wage votes empirically tests for the influences by constituents affected by the passage of the legislation and finds a strong influence associated with special interest contributions of labor unions and small business rose 1978 uses senate votes on the helms amendment of the financial institutions act of 1975 to look at the influence of characteristics of state banking markets on voting behavior with only one political variable party affiliation included in rose s model only weak evidence of the influence of senators by the industry affected by the outcome of the vote is rendered the results of studies published in the 1980s are mixed chappell 1982 finds evidence of the influence of constituent interests and personal ideology in an examination of eight votes affecting seven different industries however he did not conclude that special interest political contributions provide significant impacts on the other hand frendreis and waterman s 1985 analysis of the 1980 trucking deregulation bill provides results suggesting that senators are indeed influenced by political action committee pac contributions as empirical research on voting behavior continued in the 1990s the following studies examine votes in the house of representatives stratmann s 1995 study of legislation associated with agricultural price supports provides further confirmation of the importance of special interest campaign contributions the results presented in colburn and hudgins s 1996 study of regulation for the troubled thrift industry suggests that both political variables and financial variables characterizing the business affected by the legislation play roles in determining how a member of the house votes colburn and hudgins provide evidence that pac contributions political ideology variables of the legislator and the asset portfolio characteristics of the regulated thrifts influence the legislator s votes empirical studies to date suggest with mixed results that legislators with their own political ideologies have been influenced by both the characteristics of their business constituents and special interests promoted by pac contributions this article examines the 1991 votes associated with interstate branching these votes are particularly interesting for several reasons first the banking industry and hence banking special interest organizations would be split in their incentives to encourage or discourage the legislators to vote in favor of interstate branching second the particulars concerning branching and banking within and across state boundaries have been determined by state legislators since the 1920s this move to nationwide branching would take away states abilities to protect their banks third 1991 legislation comes on the heals of 1989 legislation calling for funds to deal with the thrift crisis and federal legislators were criticized at length for legislation passed in the early 1980s that allowed the financial burden of the thrift crisis to increase in magnitude this study examines the influences on the voting behavior of members of the house and senate by estimating a voting model with public choice variables both ideological and special interest variables capturing state banking laws and business variables characterizing the affected banking industry in the congressional member s state the focus is on congressional actions in 1991 resulting in a red light for interstate branching

public debt positional concerns and wealth inequality abstract we consider an ak growth model with positional concerns and public debt financed by distortionary income taxes we show that if positional concerns are not too strong there is a threshold level of the debt to gdp ratio for the debt to gdp ratio below this level the economy converges to a unique egalitarian balanced growth equilibrium whereas if this ratio is above the threshold level the economy eventually settles on a two class balanced growth equilibrium the rate of growth in the egalitarian equilibrium is higher than that in any possible two class equilibrium thus a reduction in public debt may cause the economy to switch from the two class regime to the egalitarian regime and accelerate growth our results also suggest that policies aimed at reducing initial inequality using public debt may in fact increase wealth inequality in the long run

the savers spenders theory of fiscal policy the macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy is usually based on one of two canonical models the barro ramsey model of infinitely lived families or the diamond samuelson model of overlapping generations this paper argues that neither model is satisfactory and suggests an alternative in the proposed model some consumers plan ahead for themselves and their descendants while others live paycheck to paycheck this model is easier to reconcile with the essential facts about consumer behavior and wealth accumulation and it yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy

the role of innovation in bilateral oecd trade performance this paper tests an empirical model of the determinants of bilateral oecd trade with particular emphasis on the role of innovation variation in the relationship across countries and sectors is analysed two innovation proxies and actual data on innovations are used a positive relationship is found between relative innovation and bilateral trade performance at an aggregate level and for a number of manufacturing sectors sectors are also categorized as either net users or producers of innovations differences in innovation appear to have more of an impact on trade performance for the net producers of innovations than the net users of innovations

a technology gap approach to why growth rates differ abstract this paper contains a discussion and test of the technology gap approach to development and growth the basic hypotheses of the theory are tested on pooled cross sectional and time series data for 25 industrial countries for the period 1960 1983 the sample includes in addition to 19 oecd countries 6 of the most important industrial economies from the non oecd area the findings of the paper confirm that there exists a close correlation between the level of economic development measured as gdp per capita and the level of technological development measured through r d or patent statistics furthermore for the group of 25 countries as a whole technology gap models of economic growth are found to explain a large part of the actual differences in growth rates both between countries and periods as expected both the scope for imitation growth in innovative activity and efforts to narrow the gap investment appear as powerful explanatory factors of economic growth however when the non oecd countries and later usa and japan are removed from the sample the explanatory power of the technology variables especially growth in innovative activity diminishes

ideology economic interests and congressional roll call voting partisan instability and bank of the united states legislation 1811 1816 we introduce a wrinkle into the study of congressional roll call voting by focusing on a period of partisan instability in american history the era of good feelings during deviations from normal periods of two party rule the dominant model of voting behavior the ideological model loses precision in correctly classifying individual votes we contend that a pooled voting model comprised of both ideological and economic variables performs better than the basic ideological model during these unstable periods when party mechanisms no longer constrain or structure actions we believe the electoral connection is especially important and thus economic based constituency factors must be included in models of vote choice to explore this belief we focus on a particularly contentious issue the rechartering of the bank of the united states bus which was dealt with before and after a partisan decomposition occurred in the house using measures developed by poole and rosenthal 1985 1997 we find that the vote on the first bus in 1811 during a stable partisan period is organized along ideological lines by 1816 the two party system collapsed and we do not find the vote on the second bus to exhibit much ideological structure conversely we find that our pooled model predicts the vote on the second bus quite well providing a substantial improvement in fit over the basic ideological classification

the influence on congress by the thrift industry abstract the investigation of the influential role of the thrift industry on congress as demonstrated by voting behavior on regulatory policy changes in the eighties is the focus of this study specifically we search for the degree to which the inadequately capitalized component of the thrift industry has captured the house of representatives we examine the influence on congress by the thrift industry using the votes by the house of representatives associated with three different legislative acts the garn st germain act the competitive equality banking act and the financial institutions reform recovery and enforcement act addressing the thrift crisis using a multi chotomous voting model we identify traditional public choice variables that could influence the probability of voting for legislation to capture the variation of the thrifts interests we consider a series of financial variables motivated by the thrift literature of failure prediction models these variables allow us to investigate the influences from the health of the congressional district s thrifts their asset composition characteristics and their reliance on regulatory forbearance

research and development human capital and trade performance in technology intensive manufactures a cross country analysis abstract this paper comprises an extensive examination of the relationship between commonly utilized policy indicators of national technological capability and observed trade success in technology intensive manufactures across 52 countries in the 1980s a central focus is the relative performance of policy indicators which directly measure innovative activity such as patent output and expenditure and employed scientists and engineers in r d versus those measuring general efforts at increasing national levels of human capital the study design is guided by the inter country intrasectoral approach outlined by dosi et al 19 it emphasizes differences in trade performance based on the notion of international competitiveness but also compares results for conventional revealed comparative advantage indices the large number of countries included and the nature of the policy objectives adopted have necessitated a highly aggregated approach using nation wide attributes and trade in one broad technologyintensive sector as the measure of demonstrated international competitiveness simple correlation and multiple regression techniques are used to assess the association of four main sets of national attributes indicators of direct innovative activity general human capital development physical capital formation and natural resource endowment with technology intensive trade performance the empirical findings provide further support for the importance of national differences in technological capability as a determinant of structural and international competitiveness within the technology intensive sector of production they suggest that policy indicators measuring actual innovative activity and physical capital formation have a much closer link to technology intensive trade than the general educational effort or output indicators demand side measures which proxy the actual employment and application of resources for r d purposes demonstrate the strength of association required for reliable policy evaluation of real national differences in technological capability the poor performance of the general human capital supply variables highlights the need for a careful consideration of the optimality of the allocation of substantial levels of scarce national resources to broad based educational output a number of other significant results concerning the link between technology indicators technology intensive trade and economic performance are discussed

the impact of technological innovation on international trade patterns the evidence reconsidered abstract this paper presents some new evidence in relation to the role of technical change in particular industrial innovation on the international competitiveness of the various oecd countries its originality consists primarily of a using a technology output indicator to measure technological performance b presenting and comparing various measures of trade and technological performance for each individual oecd country with the exception of iceland c analysing at a relatively high level of product industry disaggregation the relationship between export performance and technological performance at the same time the very limited scope of the paper has to be emphasized a the analysis is purely static all the evidence presented relates to one year 1977 b most of the results obtained are preliminary and should be further substantiated by more detailed empirical and theoretical research c as a consequence little attention has been paid to policy implications which it was felt could only be discussed properly in a later stage the paper consists of four sections a brief review of the state of the art section 1 a discussion on definitions of technology intensity section 2 the development of the best technology output indicator section 3 and the empirical analysis itself section 4 the following most important results emerge from these various sections a there are serious shortcomings in using average technology intensity as bench mark for classifying products or industries in technology intensive or nontechnology intensive categories b there is a substantial difference between technology intensity as measured on the basis of a technology input proxy rd c yet as between countries the most traditional output and input indicators the number of patents granted and the amount spent on rd d foreign patenting in particular foreign patenting in the united states figs 1 and 2 section 3 is a more reliable technology output proxy than domestic patenting e in terms of technological comparative advantage as opposed to technology intensity it is the small oecd countries as opposed to the large ones which seem to base their trade comparative advantage on technological comparative performance table 7 section 4 1 f at the individual industry level it is found that i for most technology intensive industries defined however in a less restrictive way than us r d intensities a close relation exists between technological performance and export performance and ii that as compared to other country specific resource variables technological performance is the most important trade explanatory variable its elasticity increasing with the technology intensity of industries tables 11 and 12 section 4 2 space constraints prevented us from presenting the data in relation to the inter industry and inter country analysis these can however be obtained from the author

global r d networks and large scale innovations the case of the automobile industry abstract the transition towards mass flexibility the increasing heterogeneity of the automobile market and the penetration of foreign investment have been singled out as important factors behind the rise of post national corporations operating in multiple regions of the world such firms not only conduct sales and assembly operations on a multi regional basis but it is claimed rd and ii by coordinating activities globally the purpose of this research is to determine whether r d activities in the automobile industry are globalized it was found that the process of large scale innovation the acceleration of product development and the increasing strategic importance of technology tend to concentrate r d e activities near the home base the factors limiting the concentration of this phenomenon are the dispersion of foreign sales the surveillance of competitor s engineering and styling activities and the support of foreign assembly plants firms pursuing global export or regional strategies tend to concentrate r d e activities near the home base only firms pursuing multi regional strategies have partly dispersed r d e activities to major regional markets the development of global networks is constrained by communication difficulties travel time and cost as well as by pressures for regional autonomy

large firms in the production of the world s technology an important case of non globalisation us patenting by 686 of the world s largest manufacturing firms shows that their share of the world s production of technology is less than their share of r d activities and varies greatly amongst sectors in most cases the technological activities of these large firms are concentrated in their home country the characteristics of which influence the volume and trends in their technological activities much more strongly then the international component of these activities at the same time these large firms are major elements in the volume and the pattern of sectoral specializations in their home countries technological activities

analyzing literature based innovation output indicators the italian experience abstract this paper presents the results of a study on the product innovations introduced in the italian market in 1989 and reported in a selected number of trade journals the analysis of data collected by means of this literature based counting procedure confirms that r d oriented industries and large firms do not in italy have a marked competitive advantage in innovation the country appears to be instead characterized by a significant presence of consumer goods industries and small firms in innovation our data indicate a statistically significant association between trade competitiveness and strength in product innovation and show the comparatively higher capacity for product innovation of some of the industries in which italy achieves a positive performance in international trade moreover the presence of spillovers at the regional level from both private and public r d expenditures proves to be positively correlated with the development of product innovations finally small firms with fewer than 50 employees appear to be more innovative than is usually believed to be the case

foreign patenting in the u s as a technology indicator the case of norway abstract foreign patenting in the u s has been considered to be a useful technology indicator in comparisons between countries in order to shed light on this topic this paper will try to explain foreign patenting in the u s by way of data for one country norway a crucial question is what role is played by exports in explaining the foreign patent activity is the u s patenting just an indicator of the export performance or is it the other way around that technology measured by foreign patent activity is an important trade explanatory variable the first part of this paper deals with the relationship between norwegian u s patenting and export to the u s by way of time series analysis on data from 1883 to 1980 then some more detailed analysis are done on industry level data from 1920 and from 1960 1980 an hypothesis is further tested for the possible relationship between foreign u s patenting and the international business cycles finally a detailed but tentative analysis is done on firm level data for the years 1969 1980 the results lend partial support to the assumption that foreign u s patent activity reflects innovative activity in the country where the patents originated a major advantage in using foreign patenting in the u s as a technology indicator is that this type of data in general seems to be of a higher quality than domestic patent data

campaign contributions and congressional voting does the timing of contributions matter theoretical and empirical studies do not address whether campaign contributions from more than one election cycle are important for congressional voting behavior further they do not address whether campaign contributions from different periods have different effects on legislative voting behavior this paper analyzes the cumulative effect of campaign contributions over two time periods moreover this paper studies the importance of the timing of contributions for legislative voting behavior ten roll call votes on price supports and quotas for various farm commodities in 1981 and 1985 are analyzed most of the estimated contribution coefficients are statistically significant the results show that without campaign contributions farm interest would have lost in five of the seven votes that were won moreover contributions that were given at approximately the same time as the vote have a larger impact on voting behavior than contributions that the legislator received one or two years prior to the vote copyright 1995 by mit press

interest group competition and the organization of congress theory and evidence from financial services political action committees we develop a positive theory of how interest group competition shapes the organization of congress and use it to explain campaign contribution patterns in financial services since interest groups cannot enforce fee for service contracts with legislators legislators have an incentive to create specialized standing committees which foster repeated dealing between interests and committee members the resulting reputational equilibrium supports high contributions and high legislative effort for the interests contribution patterns by competing interests in the congressional battle over whether banks can enter new businesses support the theory which also has implications for term limits and campaign reform

political action committee spending and senate roll call voting this paper addresses how pac spending affects the roll call voting behavior of u s senators using a theoretical framework which draws broadly on the voting literature we develop models that explain senatorial voting behavior in a pre pac and post pac world testing both models we find weak support for a downs black view of voting participation in the first model the second model supports the alteration of voting incentives resulting from pac spending we find that pacs have a positive effect on voting participation the conjecture remains whether pacs change voting outcomes but it is clear that they buy voting participation

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