Regulation and Productivity Performance

The paper reviews theory and evidence on the ways in which regulationaffects productivity outcomes. In a context of endogenous growth,it is argued that traditional measures of compliance costs missthe potentially most important impacts of regulation on productivitywhich occur through changes in incentives to invest and to innovate.Recent attempts to measure cross-country variations in the strengthof product-market and employment regulation are considered andsome weaknesses are highlighted. Nevertheless, consistent withendogenous growth models, there appears to be quite strong evidencethat regulations which inhibit entry into product markets havean adverse effect on TFP growth in OECD countries. Althoughthere are some discrepancies in the evidence, on most measuresthe UK appears lightly regulated relative to France and Germany,and this may have contributed to a reduction in the recent pastin the UK's TFP gap. Footnotes ¹ E-mail address: n.crafts{at}warwick.ac.uk     

Using a distance measure to operationalise patent originality

We introduce a distance measure to operationalise Trajtenberg, Henderson, and Jaffe’s [1997. “University Versus Corporate Patents: A Window on the Basicness of Invention.” Economics of Innovation and New Technology 5: 19–50] originality construct (an ex-ante indicator of firms’ technological capabilities). Our measure captures (1) technological diversity, (2) technology distance from patent antecedents, and (3) degree of novelty per each patented innovation. The V-score measure uses the Derwent World Patent Index system to classify technologies hierarchically – making similarities and differences pronounced. Power is gained by using all of the technology-classification codes describing a focal patent’s claims when calculating whether its technology space was incrementally different or radical from those of its antecedent patents (and identifying whether its technology-class code combinations were commonplace at the time when the patent application was made). Our V-score’s prediction of firms’ performance is contrasted with Hall, Jaffe, and Trajtenberg’s [2001. Hall, B. H., A. B. Jaffe, and M. Trajtenberg. 2001. The NBER Patent Citations Data File: Lessons, Insights and Methodological Tools. NBER Working Paper No. 8498] Herfindahl measure of the same originality construct. Results indicate that the distance measure of technological content produces differently signed results when evaluating patents’ performance effects or predicting a firm’s trajectory.     

A discrete event simulation to model the cost-utility of fingolimod and natalizumab in rapidly evolving severe relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis in the UK

Objective: Two disease-modifying therapies are licensed in the EU for use in rapidly-evolving severe (RES) relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS), fingolimod and natalizumab. Here a discrete event simulation (DES) model to analyze the cost-effectiveness of natalizumab and fingolimod in the RES population, from the perspective of the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, is reported.

Methods: A DES model was developed to track individual RES patients, based on Expanded Disability Status Scale scores. Individual patient characteristics were taken from the RES sub-groups of the pivotal trials for fingolimod. Utility data were in line with previous models. Published costs were inflated to NHS cost year 2015. Owing to the confidential patient access scheme (PAS) discount applied to fingolimod in the UK, a range of discount levels were applied to the fingolimod list price, to capture the likelihood of natalizumab being cost-effective in a real-world setting.

Results: At the lower National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) threshold of £20,000/quality-adjusted life year (QALY), fingolimod only required a discount greater than 0.8% of list price to be cost-effective. At the upper threshold of £30,000/QALY employed by the NICE, fingolimod was cost-effective if the confidential discount is greater than 2.5%. Sensitivity analyses conducted using fingolimod list-price showed the model to be most sensitive to changes in the cost of each drug, particularly fingolimod.

Conclusions: The DES model shows that only a modest discount to the UK fingolimod list-price is required to make fingolimod a more cost-effective option than natalizumab in RES RRMS.     

Optimal Management of Environmental Externalities with Time Lags and Uncertainty

Many environmental externalities occur with time lags that can range from a few days to several centuries in length, and many of these externalities are also subject to uncertainty. In this paper, we examine the key features of an optimal policy to manage environmental externalities that are both lagged and stochastic. We develop a two-period, two-polluter model and obtain closed-form solutions for optimal emissions levels under different combinations of damage functions and stochastic processes. These solutions show that it is not obvious whether greater control should be exerted on polluters that generate externalities with longer lags or on polluters that generate externalities with shorter lags. We find that the optimal ranking of polluters with respect to the length of the time lag associated with their externality will depend on (a) the discount rate, (b) conditional expectations of future states of the polluted resource, (c) persistence of the pollutant, and (d) initial conditions.     

The Industrial Statistics Divide: Are Statisticians Really Relevant to Business and Industry?

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Scalability and robustness of a network resource allocation system using market-based agents

In this paper, we consider issues associated with scalability and robustness in designing a market-based multi-agent system that allocates bandwidth in a communications network. Specifically, an empirical evaluation is carried out to assess the system performance under a variety of design configurations in order to provide an insight into network deployment issues. This extends our previous work in which we developed an application that makes use of market-based software agents that compete in decentralised marketplaces to buy and sell bandwidth resources in a network that is partitioned into regions, each with a separate market server. We investigate the average call success rate and average message load per market server, as the number of markets are scaled up in a fixed size network. The same investigations are performed in the presence of single market failures. Finally, for both the failure and non-failure cases, a trade-off is found between their average call success rates and message load per server in order to find an optimum number of regions to deploy in the network.     

Businessmen and land ownership in the late nineteenth century

This article analyses the proportions of personal to real estate wealth for a group of 295 businessmen profiled in the Dictionary of business biography . It shows that businessmen who owned land on a large scale in the late nineteenth century were a comparatively small group who retained a small proportion of their total wealth in landed assets. Low levels of social mobility are identified as a function of land purchase, and new insights are given into the relationship between wealth, status, and land ownership. Any integration of business and landed wealth in this period was not a consequence of businessmen becoming landowners.     

Determinants of wage and price changes in less developed countries: An intertemporal cross-country analysis

A theoretical hypothesis of wage determination, conveying the arguments of the dual economy model as well as some elements of ‘traditional’ theory, and three alternative theoretical approaches to price changes are built and statistically tested. Pooled data, with missing observations, of 36 LDCs from Asia, Africa and Latin America for 1960, 1965 and 1968 are used, while additive and multiplicative dummy variables test the behavior of regressions between alternative country groups. Price changes are found to be explained by both monetary and nonmonetary variables with relatively more weight on the latter. The empirical wage change determination conforms to the dual model, while the existence of an international Phillips curve is questionable.