Leveraging Research and Development: Assessing the Impact of the U.S. Advanced Technology Program

This paper examines the factors that affect a firm's chances of winning an award from the Advanced Technology Program (ATP) and the subsequent impact of the award on a firm's success in raising additional funds for its research and development (R&D) activities. Analysis of data from a survey of 1998 ATP applicants shows that proposals with higher ratings by technical and business/economic experts have a greater chance of winning an award. Further, the projects and firms selected by ATP are more willing to share their research findings with other firms, and tend to be those that open up new pathways for innovation through combining technical areas or by forming new R&D partnerships. Most of the non-winners have not proceeded with any aspect of the R&D project proposed to ATP and, of those that have, most did so at a smaller scale. Furthermore, the ATP award has prestige value for the winning firms; the halo effect from the award increases the success of these firms in attracting additional funding from other sources. Our conclusion is that the ATP is leveraging activities that have a strong potential for broad-based economic benefit.     

The Dynamic Role of Small Firms: Evidence from the U.S.

This paper provides a conceptual and empirical account of the dynamic role of SMEs in the U.S. economy. Evidence is provided to show that SMEs are important sources of employment growth and innovation. For example, the net employment gain during 1990–95 is shown to be greater among smaller firms than among larger firms. Furthermore, while large firms often produce a larger number of patents per firm, the patenting rate for small firms is typically higher than that for large firms when measured on a per-employee basis. It is noted that public policy is shifting away from traditional measures which were based on a static conception of industrial organization and thus emphasized anti-trust, regulation and public ownership solutions, towards measures which are geared towards supporting the dynamic role of SMEs. These measures focus on providing an enabling environment for enterprise start-ups, job creation, knowledge spillovers and technological change.     

Revealed Specialization: Evidence on U.S. International Services

This article is an investigation of the comparative advantage structure of United States international trade in services. It appears that the United States has a strong comparative advantage in knowledge-based services. For this study, the author adopts the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index to analyze the comparative advantage structure, and demonstrates that variance in the RCA deviations indicates a similarity in the export structure between the United States and the world. This study also focuses on the role of multinational companies, linking microeconomic entities and the macroeconomic surroundings.     

Looking Ahead: Opportunities and Challenges for U.S. Manufacturers

Manufacturing has received increased attention in recent years, as it has enhanced its importance in the economy with output and employment gains and as a driving force of U.S. exports. Nonetheless, the sector faces serious challenges as well as opportunities. The challenges are weak global economic growth, burdensome taxes and regulation, and a labor force that is unprepared to meet twenty-first century needs. Opportunities, however, are likely to more than offset the challenges. These are an improving energy environment, an improved climate for international trade, strong productivity growth, and continued strength in innovation.     

Plant-level responses to antidumping duties: Evidence from U.S. manufacturers

This paper describes the effects of a temporary increase in tariffs on the performance and behavior of U.S. manufacturers. Using a dataset that includes the full population of U.S. manufacturing plants, I show that an apparent positive correlation between antidumping duties and traditional revenue productivity is likely misleading. For the subset of plants reporting quantity-based output data, increases in prices and markups artificially inflate the effect of antidumping duties on revenue productivity, while physical productivity actually falls. Moreover, antidumping duties allow low-productivity plants to continue producing protected products, slowing the reallocation of resources from less productive to more productive uses.     

美国CFIUS的外资并购审查与应对策略

经过30多年的变革和发展,美国CFIUS的外资并购审查制度日益完备和严格。近年来,由于受CFIUS安全审查的限制,我国“走出去”的企业如中海油、华为、鞍钢、西色公司等对目标公司的收购都以失败告终。要规避赴美收购中的法律风险,应从深化国有企业改革、加强交流与游说、建立支持机制、选择并购对象、制定并购策略等方面着手。     

Empirical Analysis of the Assessment of Innovation Effects in U.S. Merger Cases

In merger policy it is still an open question how the negative effects of mergers on innovation should be assessed. In this empirical study all mergers that were challenged by the U.S. antitrust agencies FTC and DOJ between 1995 and 2008 were analyzed in regard to the question to what extent and how the agencies assessed the innovation effects of mergers. The study also contributes to the discussion about differences and convergence in the merger assessments of the two agencies FTC and DOJ. Our results show (1) that in one third of all challenged mergers also innovation concerns have been raised (with no significant differences between the agencies). (2) Despite the wide-spread rejection of the “innovation market approach” in the antitrust debate the agencies used more often an innovation-specific assessment approach that includes also innovation in the market definition than the traditional product market concept. (3) Overall, we found both significant similarities and differences as well as some convergence over time in regard to the specifics of the assessment of innovation effects of mergers between both agencies.     

Challenges in the education of the contemporary U.S. international manager

Failure rates of 30% for U.S. expatriate international managers relative to less than 10% for comparable Japanese and European international managers represent substantial costs to individuals, corporations, and U.S. global economic interests. The authors provide a profile of successful expatriate international managers and recommend four changes: (1) inclusion of international management development as a strategic U.S. corporate issue for global success; (2) alteration of current U.S. corporate selection procedures; (3) expanded implementation of rigorous leading edge international training programs; and (4) a renewed U.S. corporate-academic-government collaborative partnership to enhance international competitiveness.     

What matters in a price negotiation: Evidence from the U.S. auto retailing industry

While there is a great deal of theoretical and experimental literature on what factors affect bargaining outcomes, there is little empirical work based on data from real markets. In this paper we analyze negotiations for new cars, a $340 billion industry in the United States in 2010. Our results suggest that search costs, incomplete information, and bargaining disutility have an economically significant effect in real-world negotiations: we estimate that relative to an uninformed consumer, a consumer with basic information about the seller’s reservation price and his own outside options captures 15% of the average dealer margin from selling an automobile. We also find that a buyer’s search cost and bargaining disutility have significant effects on bargaining outcomes. Finally, our results show that while search is common, there remains a substantial group of consumers who do not engage in any of the search behaviors we measure. We hypothesize that these buyers are not aware of how easy and effective certain activities in improving negotiation outcomes can be.     

Evidence of creative destruction in the U.S. economy

Schumpeter discusses the importance of innovation and new firm entry in a capitalistic economy as a means to creatively destruct oligopolies and generate new economic wealth. He warns of R&D becoming the arena of professional engineers in large corporations; Schumpeter feared the obsolescence of entrepreneurship would result in an increasing concentration of wealth among large corporations and toward socialism.Using a longitudinal data base of U.S. corporations over the period 1961–1980, this paper statistically tests several aspects of Schumpeter's analysis. Overall our results give some support to Schumpeter's creative destruction hypothesis, though there exists some sensitivity to the measure of size used. We find most of the firms exiting the ranks of the largest 500 firms (as measured by assets) are those with ranks in the 401–500 range; there is also evidence of churning as the same firms enter and exit the top 500 over time. Additionally, we find that merger has gained prominence as the reason why firms exit the top 500. Among our conclusions is that further work is needed on the role of mergers in the growth-and decline-of entrepreneurial firms.     

Buyer-seller relationships in international trade: Evidence from U.S. States' exports and business-class travel

International trade has become increasingly dependent on the transmission of complex information, often realized via face-to-face communication. This paper provides novel evidence for the importance of in-person business meetings in international trade. Interactions among trade partners entail a fixed cost of trade, but at the same time they generate relationship capital, which adds bilateral specific value to the traded products. Differences in the face-to-face communication intensity of traded goods, bilateral travel costs and foreign market size determine the optimal amount of interaction between trade partners. Using U.S. state level data on international business-class air travel as a measure of in-person business meetings, I find robust evidence that the demand for business-class air travel is directly related to volume and composition of exports in differentiated products. I also find that trade flows in R&D intensive manufactures and goods facing contractual frictions are most dependent on face-to-face meetings. The econometric identification exploits the cross-state variation in bilateral exports and business-class air travelers by foreign country and time period, circumventing any spurious correlation induced by cross-country differences driving aggregate travel and trade patterns.     

An empirical analysis of the market for formal venture capital: Evidence from the U.S.

The objective of this paper is to conduct an empirical analysis of the risk-return relationships in the formal venture capital market and compare such relationships with the trade-offs available through comparable investment vehicles. Based on ten years of market data, the performance of the venture capital companies (VCCs) is compared with that of the mutual funds as well as the broad market index. Test results from our study show that on average the VCCs well outperformed the comparable mutual funds as well as the market benchmark. The VCCs had the same level of risk as the high-growth mutual funds but yielded 9.5% more return on an annual basis. When ranked according to their performances, the VCCs occupied the top of the list.     

Public and Private Challenges of an Aging U.S. Population

The challenges posed by the aging of the U.S. population for business and public policy are vast. They are amplified particularly by:??Slow increase of incomes—and therefore low private savings—for those at the bottom of the pay distribution.??Cutbacks in employee health-care insurance and defined benefit pension plans.??Unsustainability of Social Security and Medicare as currently configured.This paper spells out these challenges and discusses how they can be addressed. Of particular importance are some combination of enhanced revenue and reduced expenditure for Social Security and Medicare, the shift of private pension plans from defined benefit to defined contribution, the need to consider later retirement ages, and the need for improved personal financial literacy.     

Technological opportunism effects on IT adoption,intra-firm diffusion and performance: Evidence from the U.S. and Spain

The paper pursues a joint analysis of the direct influence of the level of a firm's technology opportunism capability on performance and on the adoption and intra-firm diffusion of Internet-based technologies. The study here examines the mediating effect that intra-firm diffusion exerts on the relationship between capabilities and performance. This study uses the results from a survey of 100 Spanish and 109 American franchise firms. Results indicate that the firm's level technological opportunism influences the adoption and intra-firm diffusion of technology and also has a positive impact on performance. While intra-firm diffusion is a driver of performance, adoption has no influence. Finally the indirect impact of technological opportunism on performance differs across countries. While for American firms, the integration of technologies into activities that related to communication with partners has a positive impact on performance; Spanish managers should focus on the integration of these technologies into back-end functionalities.     

The Impact of a Rising Dollar on the U.S. Economy

Since June 2014, the dollar has strengthened dramatically. The effects of such a rise—and its likely continuation—on the U.S. economy are many, complex, and often obscure and could affect a number of business decisions. In this paper, the authors investigate the impact of a 10 percent rise in the value of the dollar against all other currencies through the use of a macroeconometric model. They examine direct effects and the full range of indirect effects and find that through a number of negative feedback the indirect effects will significantly offset the direct effects on GDP, interest rates, and many other macroeconomic variables—including the value of the dollar itself.     

Impact of sociodemographic and economic factors on sodium intake in the U.S.A.

The effect of sodium intake on human health has received increased attention in recent years. This paper evaluates the impact of various sociodemographic and economic factors on sodium intake of a sample of Americans. Results indicate that urbanization. region, race, weight and height of an individual, gender, diet status, household size, age and income significantly affect sodium intake. Knowledge of the influence of sociodemographic and economic factors on sodium intake is necessary especially in the design and practical implementation of nutrition education and outreach programmes.     

美元特权对美国贸易逆差的影响探析

美元特权的形成使贸易逆差成为输出美元的主要途径,并对贸易逆差起到了助长作用,集中表现在美元特权使美国维持着巨额贸易逆差而不受外汇储备短缺的制约和金融危机的威胁,却使其他追求美元储备的国家依靠贸易顺差和过度储蓄来摆脱不利处境,从而从供给和需求两个方面推动了美国贸易逆差的持续扩大。但贸易逆差的继续发展和未来的调整势必会影响美元特权地位的巩固,使世界经济特别是发展中国家的国际经济活动面临极大的风险。     

The Impact of Forest Certification on Firm Financial Performance in Canada and the U.S.

The purpose of this article is to examine empirically the impact of environmental certification on firm financial performance (FP). The main question is whether there is a “green premium” for certified firms, and, if so, for what kind of certification. We analyze the short-run and the long-run stock price performance using an event-study methodology on a sample of Canadian and U.S. firms. The results of short-run event abnormal returns indicate that forest certification does not have any significant impact on firm FP regardless of the certification system carried out by firms. Unlike the short-run results, the long-run post-event abnormal returns suggest that forest certification has, on average, a negative impact on firm FP. However, the impact of forest certification on firm FP depends on who grants the certification, since only industry-led certification (Sustainable Forestry Initiative, Canadian Standards Association and ISO14001) are penalized by financial markets, whereas non-governmental organizations–led Forest Stewardship Council certification is not.     

Returns to Scale in Small and Large U.S. Manufacturing Establishments: Further Evidence

Nguyen and Reznek (1991) used plant-level data for five 4-digit SIC industries to estimate and compare the degrees of returns-to-scale for establishments of various size classes for the years 1977 and 1982. They found that the estimated scale elasticities of all plant sizes have values approximately equal to one. They, therefore, concluded that both small and large establishments under study are equally efficient in production. The purpose of the present study is to extend and improve upon Nguyen and Reznek's work by (1) extending the data set to cover the entire U.S. manufacturing sector, (2) improving the model by including energy as a separate input in production, and (3) relaxing the assumption of homogeneity and estimating an unrestricted (non-homogeneous, non-homothetic) production model. With the improved model and data, it is found that the estimated scale elasticities for all sizes of establishment are statistically insignificantly different from one. Thus, the result confirms and strengthens Nguyen and Reznek's finding that a large establishment size is not a necessary condition for efficient production.