a review of the recent empirical literature on displaced workers this article reviews the empirical literature on job displacement job displacement is widespread and strongly countercyclical tending to peak during economic downturns but concentrated in indus

population agglomeration and the effectiveness of enterprise subsidies a chinese analysis this paper investigates the impact of population agglomeration on the relation between government subsidies and firm innovation it constructs a parsimonious model to show that the positive effect

the allocation and effectiveness of china s r d subsidies evidence from listed firms abstract in this study we investigate the allocation of china s r d subsidies and their effectiveness in stimulating business r d investments for the population of chinese listed firms between 2001 and 2006 with respect to subsidy allocation we find that firm selection is mainly determined by prior grants high quality inventions and minority state ownership market oriented provincial governments distribute grants less frequently and firms located in developed provinces receive grants more often considering effectiveness r d subsidies instantaneously crowd out business r d investment but are neutral in later periods in 2006 one public rmb reduces business r d investments by half an rmb however crowding out is not prevalent for repeated recipients of r d subsidies high tech firms and minority state owned firms

government r d subsidies as a signal for private investors abstract government subsidies for r d are intended to promote projects with high returns to society but too little private returns to be beneficial for private investors this may be caused by spillovers or a low appropriability rate apart from the direct funding of these projects government grants may serve as a signal for good investments for private investors we use a simple signaling model with different types of r d projects to capture this phenomenon the agency has a preference for basic research projects as they promise high expected social returns while banks prefer applied research projects with high private returns in a setup where the subsidy can only be used to distinguish between basic and applied research projects government agency s signal is not very helpful for banks however if the subsidy is accompanied by a quality signal it can lead to increased or better selected private investments

you can t manage right what you can t measure well technological innovation efficiency abstract this paper proposes a new approach to tackle the innovation performance relationship it addresses the so far mixed and inconclusive results of studies analyzing this relationship we argue that the undifferentiated use of innovation inputs and outputs to measure firm innovativeness is not without problems and that from a productive perspective they should be simultaneously analyzed this study follows a two stage empirical analysis using a sample of spanish manufacturing firms for the period 1992 2005 by examining two inputs and two outputs of the innovation process in the first stage we estimate technological innovation efficiency by means of an intertemporal data envelopment analysis dea bootstrap and also observe the yearly efficiency changes based on a global malmquist index in the second stage we analyze the effect of technological innovation efficiency on firm performance through a generalized method of moments gmm system the results support our arguments that the best measurement of outcomes of technological innovations is through the efficiency with which they are developed in addition we test the moderating effect of technological intensity level and firm size on the efficiency performance relationship

an analysis of bilateral intra industry trade in the food processing sector this paper analyses determinants of intra industry trade in food processing for a 30 country sample over the period 1964 85 previous studies have tested the hypothesis that imperfect competition is a major determinant of intra industry trade iit in the durable goods manufacturing sectors this study is distinguised from the earlier studies of iit by the examination of the processed food sector sic 20 the use of a panel data set for 22 years and 30 countries available at the four digit sic level the use of purchasing power parity measures of gdp and the use of a weighted tobit model with fixed effects to account for the censored cross section time series nature of the date the results indicate that iti in food processing is a positive function of a country s gdp per capita and equality if gdp per capita between countries in addition it is also found that such trade is strongly influenced by distance between trading partners membership in customs unions and free trade blocs and also exchange r

job security and job search in more than one labor market i introduction a person looking for a new job faces a choice not only of which jobs to accept but where to search for a job in this connection differences in job security across sectors of the economy would appear to be a major concern of many workers however job security has not found a commensurate place in the literature on job search largely due to the single sector orientation of standard search models this paper analyzes the optimal search behavior of unemployed workers who may search in two distinct labor markets or sectors of the economy it is shown that the optimal policy assigns the same reservation wage but different search intensities in each sector the search literature has generally assumed that a worker searches for a job in a single labor market jobs differ from each other once found but while searching all jobs look the same to a worker until an offer is made in this context jobs with higher layoff rates have been shown to induce higher lower or no different reservation wages than similar jobs with lower layoff rates depending upon the specifics of the models which are not compelling examples include burdett and mortensen 1980 hey and mavromaras 1981 ioannides 1981 sargent 1987 and wright 1986 1987 despite our intuitions these studies provide no strong suggestion that a worker will be more likely to become employed in a type of job which offers greater job security all else equal it is otherwise in a multi sector world while the reservation wages associated with the two sectors of the economy are equal despite differences in layoff rates a worker will search more intensively in the sector with a lower layoff rate ii the model the model is simple the worker maximizes his expected wealth in a continuous time stationary environment over an infinite time horizon there are two sectors a and b each is characterized by a permanent layoff rate an offer arrival rate and a wage offer distribution the model generalizes the standard search paradigm and generalizes easily to n sectors accordingly familiar derivations will be omitted they can be found in fallick 1990 an unemployed worker may search for a job in either or both of the sectors simultaneously he pays search costs depending upon how much he searches in total the worker may not search while employed and there is no possibility of being recalled to a previous job the worker may move from unemployment to employment in either sector by receiving and accepting a wage offer from that sector wage offers from sector j j a b are random variables drawn independently from a constant exogenous distribution function f sup j w offers expire immediately if not accepted an employed worker may move from employment in either sector to unemployment by being laid off every job in a sector has the same layoff rate an employed worker never quits it would never be optimal to quit anyway assume that the instantaneous probability of receiving a job offer from sector j is equal to alpha sub j sigma s sub j where alpha sub j the offer arrival rate is the exogenous instantaneous probability that an offer from sector j arrives during the period the term alpha sub j is constant over time the term sigma s sub j is a function of the intensity with which the worker searches in sector j while unemployed normalize the total amount of search intensity available at any one time to unity so that s sub a s sub b is less than or equal to 1 let sigma center dot be an increasing concave function with sigma 0 0 sigma 1 1 sigma prime 0 infinity and sigma prime 1 0 the instantaneous probability of a permanent lay off from a job in sector j is lambda sub j there is a constant marginal cost of searching c assume that job offers and layoffs are generated by constant poisson processes in standard fashion the instantaneous probability of receiving more than one offer simultaneously vanishes

intra industry trade in agrofood sectors the case of the eec meat market examination of intra industry trade iit and of its determinants has so far been confined to industrial commodity markets taking the case of red meat the possibility of trade overlap in a typical agroffod commodity is observed further based on previous theoretical analyses and empirical indications it tests formally a general and a restricted set of country and industry or demand and supply hypotheses which being particular to the eec meat market may account for cross country variations in iit in 1988 results suggest that taste overlap as approached by countries cultural and economic convergence as well as the imperfectly competitive structure of the market as supported by product differentiation significantly explain iit despite some methodological shortcomings there seems to be ample scope for the application of similar models in other agrofood sectors in what remains a relatively under researched area

the effects of public r d subsidies on firms innovation activities the case of eastern germany this study analyzes the effects of public r d policy schemes on the innovation activities of firms in eastern germany the main question in this context is whether public funds stimulate r d activities or simply crowd out privately financed r d empirically we investigate the average causal effects of all public r d schemes in eastern germany using a nonparametric matching approach compared to the case in which no public financial means are provided it turns out that firms increase their innovation activities by about four percentage points

innovation expenditures and the role of government in belgium abstract unlike suggestions from earlier research on the schumpeterian hypothesis it is argued and shown that sales and employment are not simply substitute size measures to test the r d behaviour of foreign and domestic companies operating in belgium further suggests that government sponsored r d has not substituted for privately funded r d foreign companies are found to behave differently and to do less r d the more they pay for externally supplied technology

r d and subsidies at the firm level an application of parametric and semi parametric two step selection models this paper analyzes the effects of public r d subsidies on r d expenditure in the german manufacturing sector the focus is on the question whether public r d funding stimulates or crowds out private investment cross sectional data at the firm level is used by apllying parametric and semiparametric selection models it turns out that public funding increases firms r d expenditure altough the magnitude of the treatment effect depends on the assumpions imposed by the particular selection model

measuring firm size in empirical corporate finance abstract in empirical corporate finance firm size is commonly used as an important fundamental firm characteristic however no research comprehensively assesses the sensitivity of empirical results in corporate finance to different measures of firm size this paper fills this hole by providing empirical evidence for a measurement effect in the size effect in particular we examine the influences of employing different proxies total assets total sales and market capitalization of firm size in 20 prominent areas in empirical corporate finance research we highlight several empirical implications first in most areas of corporate finance the coefficients of firm size measures are robust in sign and statistical significance second the coefficients on regressors other than firm size often change sign and significance when different size measures are used unfortunately this suggests that some previous studies are not robust to different firm size proxies third the goodness of fit measured by r squared also varies with different size measures suggesting that some measures are more relevant than others in different situations fourth different proxies capture different aspects of firm size and thus have different implications therefore the choice of size measures needs both theoretical and empirical justification finally our empirical assessment provides guidance to empirical corporate finance researchers who must use firm size measures in their work

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment reconsidered this paper develops a new measure of reallocation shocks based on the variance of industry stock market excess returns to assess the contribution of sectoral reallocation to unemployment in the postwar u s economy the beveridge curve relationship is used to establish that this series isolates reallocation shocks reallocation shocks are found to explain only a moderate share of the fluctuations in aggregate unemployment on average over the period however reallocation accounted for a substantial share of increases in unemployment in several episodes particularly the mid 1970s reallocation shocks also account for a larger share of fluctuations in unemployment of longer durations than of shorter durations

the private r d investment response to federal design and technical competitions it is the federal government s role to promote investment in research and development rd and 2 contracting with private firms and nonprofit organizations such as universities to perform rd the winning firm recovered its development costs in the form of profits on the sale of the airplanes and the losing firms did not recoup their r d investment mansfield 1971 p 122

commercial policy and intra industry trade abstract this paper constructs a model of intra industry trade within a multi product industry whose output range is limited to that obtainable from a particular type of capital intra industry trade is a natural outcome in this structure without requiring increasing returns to scale or imperfectly competitive markets and with its pattern determined along traditional relative factor abundance lines the volume of this trade will vary inversely with the level of trade restrictions as observed empirically other policies are then considered for their influence on the range rather than the level of domestic production since the former is the more likely policy objective under these circumstances

assessing the policy mix of public support to business r d abstract this paper investigates whether the effectiveness of public support to business r d increases or decreases when firms benefit from different support schemes data on the amount received by individual firms in the available support schemes in belgium over the period 2003 2011 are matched with other firm level data estimations of this panel of firms permit to account for the time dimension and selection mechanism in public support as well as for observed and unobserved firm heterogeneity results on the impact of public support appear to depend on the econometric specification and estimation procedure that is considered robust results indicate that the effectiveness of r d support decreases when firms benefit from different schemes at the same time especially when firms combine subsidies with several tax benefits

human capital and industrialization evidence from the age of enlightenment while human capital is a strong predictor of economic development today its importance for the industrial revolution is typically assessed as minor to resolve this puzzling contrast we differentiate average human capital worker skills from upper tail knowledge both theoretically and empirically we build a simple two sector model where worker skills raise the productivity in both agriculture and manufacturing and scientific knowledge affects the entrepreneurial ability to keep up with a rapidly advancing technological frontier the model predicts that the local presence of knowledge elites is unimportant in the pre industrial era but drives growth thereafter worker skills in contrast are not crucial for growth to measure the historical presence of knowledge elites we use city level subscriptions to the famous encyclopedie in mid 18th century france we show that subscriber density is a strong predictor of city growth after 1750 but not before the onset of french industrialization alternative measures of development confirm this pattern soldier height and industrial activity are strongly associated with subscriber density after but not before 1750 literacy on the other hand does not predict growth finally by joining data on british patents with a large french firm survey from 1837 we provide evidence for the mechanism upper tail knowledge raised the productivity in innovative industrial technology

a neoclassical model of unemployment and the business cycle this paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role a rational expectations equilibrium with fully flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the marginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of those who are without jobs workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve moreover seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities such as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output

job search and the duration of layoff unemployment this paper derives an optimal job searching strategy for workers on layoff and an optimal recall policy for firms when each side anticipates the other side s actions correctly it shows that workers search for an alternative job only if the probability of recall falls below a critical level and that firms may recall before the recovery of demand depending on the costs of laying off and hiring workers and the probability of losing workers on layoff through the use of optimal job searching and recall policies the paper derives expressions for the duration of layoff unemployment and discusses briefly their comparative static properties

the relationship between federal contract r d and company r d according to recent estimates federal budget outlays for research and development rd this component will rise 28 percent and absorb 70 percent of all federal r d spending in 1984 compared to under 50 percent in 1980 since work corresponding to about one half of the dollar value of the federal r d program is generally performed by private industrial firms under contract with federal agencies the rapid increase in federal r d outlays will presumably be reflected in a similar increase in the value of commitments by industrial firms to perform government r d one of the most important economic questions posed by the large prospective increase in resources allocated to federal contract r d concerns its consequences for the economy s rate of technical progress of productivity growth in the next section i argue that the ultimate impact on productivity depends on how company decisions to finance r d are affected by the availability of federal contract r d funds i then provide a brief review and critique of previous studies of the relationship between companyand federalfinanced r d performed in industry and present new estimates which differ from existing ones with respect to both methodology and implications these estimates are consistent with the hypothesis that increases in federal r d activity tend to be associated with significant reductions in companyfinanced r d a number of studies have attempted to determine the ceteris paribus effects of company and federal r d on the rate of productivity growth p by estimating variants of the equation

a cross section analysis of intra industry trade in the u k abstract in this paper the inter industry patterns of intra industry trade in the united kingdom are explored a cross section econometric model is explained and estimated for the year 1977 two samples of 37 and 68 observations are tested using a variety of proxies for features of market structure including market concentration product differentiation and cost conditions the results suggest that a significant proportion of the inter industry variation in intra industry trade can be explained by the model

assessing the effect of public subsidies on firm r d investment a survey this survey examines the empirical literature on the relationship between public r d subsidies and private r d investment over the past five decades the survey reveals a considerable heterogeneity of empirical results that cannot be explained fully by methodological issues we aim to provide further explanations of the possible causes of that heterogeneity in particular we emphasise a set of issues that in our view are critical to understanding the potential effect of public r d subsidies on private r d spending special attention is paid to the dynamic aspects and composition of firm r d the constraints faced by the firm such as financial constraints and the amount and source of public subsidies none of these issues have been investigated in depth we formulate a set of research assumptions to guide future empirical research in this field

cyclical fluctuations and sectoral reallocation evidence from the psid abstract this paper documents the correlation between permanent sectoral reallocation and the business cycle using data from the michigan panel study of income dynamics we find that the outflow of workers from goods to services accelerates during recessions the flow from services to stable employment in surables accelerates during booms we also document the contribution of sectoral reallocation to total unemployment permanent switchers account for about a quarter of the total weeks of unemployment during booms this proportion rises to nearly 40 duing recessions

why are governmental r d and private r d complements it is well known that government r d and private r d have a complementary relationship however no previous study has provided an explanation for why that complementary relationship exists this paper argues that infratechnology is the critical link between governmental and private r d and that the observed complementarity is the result of technical complementarity at the production level between funding infratechnology and knowledge sharing a theoritical framework based on this argument is developed and examined empirically for supporting evidence evidence of technical complementary is found as well as evidence that governmental r d stimulates the sharing of knowledge

the effect of government funding on private industrial research and development a re assessment a number of previous studies have attempted to determine the effect of federal support of research and development r d performed in industry on the rate of private investment in r d by estimating regressions of private r d expenditure on federal industrial r d expenditure controlling for total demand sales and in some cases other variables this paper presents arguments and econometric evidence in support of the hypothesis that due to misspecification of the private r d equation i e failure to distinguish government sales from other sales previous estimates of the effect of federal industrial r d on private r d funding are seriously upwardly biased

effects of federal support on company financed r and d the case of energy for decades policy makers in both the public and private sectors have been concerned with the question what is the impact of changes in federal r and d support on company financed r and d expenditures this is one of the first empirical studies at a micro level of this topic the results which pertain to energy r and d indicate a complementarity between government financed and company financed r and d on the average although there is a considerable amount of interfirm variation in this regard in about one third of the projects studied federally financed r and d projects suggested some further r and d into which the firm invested its own funds the results of a logit analysis suggest that whether or not a government financed r and d project results in such a spinoff depends on the extent to which the performing firm contributes to the formulation of the project s goals and strategies

public r d policies and cost behavior of the us manufacturing industries abstract this paper estimates and evaluates the contribution of r d tax incentives and publicly financed r d investment policies in promoting the growth of output and privately funded r d investment in us manufacturing industries publicly financed r d induced cost savings but crowds out privately financed r d investment while the incremental r d tax credit and immediate deductibility provision of r d expenditures have a significant impact on privately financed r d investment the optimal mix of both instruments is an important element for sustaining a balanced growth in output and productivity in the manufacturing sector

estimating the benefits of targeted r d subsidies we study the expected welfare effects of targeted r d subsi dies using project level data from finland we model the application and r d investment decisions of firms and the subsidy granting decision of the public agency in charge of the program our model and institutional environment allow us to identify different benefits and costs of the r d subsidy program we find that expected effects of subsidies are very het erogeneous and estimated application costs low on average the social rate of return on targeted subsidies is 30 to 50 but spillover effects of subsidies are smaller than effects on firm profits

sectoral shifts and the mobility of displaced workers when are microdata useful we show that reallocation shocks that change sectoral job offer probabilities can induce negative sectoral mobility unemployment co movements this challenges murphy and topel s nber macroeconomics annual 1987 2 11 58 interpretation that such patterns in us microdata constitute evidence against sectoral shifts in driving unemployment

multiple equilibria in the theory of international trade with monopolistically competitive commodities abstract this paper develops a model of trade in monopolistically competitive commodities of the type analysed by krugman and by dixit and norman it is established that small perturbations in the parameters of the model radically change the number and type of equilibria of the model for certain parameter values the model has multiple equilibria some though possibly not all of which support intra industry trade the stability of each equilibrium is examined and it is established that if there are multiple equilibria there are multiple stable equilibria

the effects of mission oriented public r d spending on private industry this paper addresses the question of how government mission oriented r d spending affects private r d spending and thereby the total investment in technology the problem is approached within the context of the capital asset pricing model in which the firm views investment projects in terms of their risk and return characteristics the firm is assumed to produce jointly an established product and an r d intensive product where the latter generates an additional output of technology or spillover that is used as an input into the former by investing in r d the firm alters its risk and return characteristics in two ways through the expected profits from the sale of the r d intensive good and through the expected profits from the spillover in this model government mission oriented r d contracting affects the firm by enabling it to separate to some extent these two sources of risk and return the main implication of the analysis is that while some public crowding out of private r d is likely this is almost certain to be incomplete the empirical evidence from the u s transport industry supports the model and suggests that each dollar of government funding adds around 92 cents to total r d spending crowding out private investment by as little as eight percent private companies in the united states perform a great deal of publicly funded r d contract work notably in connection with defence space exploration energy and health this work is generally believed to make two contributions to society a direct effect of providing technology intensive public goods and an indirect or spillover effect into the technology content of the private goods produced by the firms which undertake the government contracts for example space technology has produced heart pacemakers alongside cryogenic insulation materials while automatic instrument landing systems benefit holidaymakers as well as air force pilots

r d subsidy and self financed r d the case of japanese high technology start ups this paper examines whether public r d subsidies constitute a substitute or complement for private financed r d the empirical analysis is based on a panel data of 223 japanese high technology start ups our evidence is consistent with the complement hypothesis i e that publicly funded r d does promote private r d the complement effects are stronger for more mature firms this is because such firms in the growth phase might have greater demands for r d funds