Technological convergence, R&D, trade and productivity growth

This paper analyses productivity growth in a panel of 14 United Kingdom manufacturing industries since 1970. Innovation and technology transfer provide two potential sources of productivity growth for a country behind the technological frontier. We examine the roles played by research and development (R&D), international trade, and human capital in stimulating each source of productivity growth. Technology transfer is statistically significant and quantitatively important. While R&D raises rates of innovation, international trade enhances the speed of technology transfer. Human capital primarily affects output through private rates of return (captured in our index of labour quality) rather than measured TFP.     

Choosing Among Regulatory Options in the United States Telecommunications Industry

We examine the determinants of the choice between rate-of-return regulation and incentive regulation in the United States telecommunications industry. We find that a state is more likely to select incentive regulation in any year: (1) when it has employed incentive regulation in the past; (2) when the Republican party controls both the executive and the legislative branches of the state government, but the Democratic party has controlled these branches historically; and (3) as the firms earnings under rate-of-return regulation increase toward the industry average. We also find that appointed regulators are more likely than their elected counterparts to revert to rate-of-return regulation.     

Aspiration level effects: An empirical investigation

Theories of aspiration level effects predict that decisions under uncertainty will depend on whether performance is above or below some target level of performance. A sample of 5000 quarterly earnings announcements by publicity held companies listed on the COMPUSTAT and CRSP data bases is examined to test this hypothesis. Four models from the current accounting literature are used as alternative estimates of the target level of earnings for these firms. When earnings are announced the difference between actual and forecast earnings, here called a forecast error, can be computed. The data indicate that the relationship between valuation and forecast error differs conditional on the sign of the forecast error.     

Discriminatory Price Auctions in Electricity Markets: Low Volatility at the Expense of High Price Levels

A pay-as-offered or discriminatory price auction (DPA) has been proposed to solve the problem of inflated and volatile wholesale electricity prices. Using the experimental method we compare the DPA with a uniform price auction (UPA), strictly controlling for unilateral market power. We find that a DPA indeed substantially reduces price volatility. However, in a no market power design, prices in a DPA converge to the high prices of a uniform price auction with structural market power. That is, the DPA in a no market power environment is as anti-competitive as a UPA with structurally introduced market power.     

Embodied and Disembodied Technical Change in Fisheries: An Analysis of the Sète Trawl Fishery, 1985–1999

Overfishing and excess capacity in mostfisheries around the world have generated considerableand increasing concern about their biological and economic performance ramifications. Theseproblems, in part, stem from substantialinvestment in technical improvements to boats andequipment in fishing fleets, which exacerbatesexcess fishing capacity and low returns tofishing effort and investment, given regulatoryand biological constraints. However, little attempt hasbeen made to quantify the extent or effects oftechnical change in fisheries. In this paper, we usedetailed data on innovation patterns for 19vessels in the Sète trawl fleet of southernFrance to evaluate the contributions oftechnical change to catch rates. We find thatembodied technical change enhanced productivity by approximately one percent per year between 1985 and 1999, but that external (disembodied) events counteractedthis trend, causing a net output decline ofabout three percent per year.     

The Antecedents of Middle Managers' Strategic Contribution: The Case of a Professional Bureaucracy

abstract    Our study contributes towards a burgeoning literature that argues organizational performance is heavily influenced by what happens in the middle of the organization, rather than at the top. Examining the UK National Health Service, our study develops the work of Floyd and Wooldridge (1992 , 1994 , 1997 , 2000 ). It utilizes role theory to conceptualize changing experiences of middle managers in organizations as a role transition. Associated with this are problems of role conflict and role ambiguity ( Biddle, 1979 , 1986 ; Biddle and Thomas, 1966 ; Kahn et al., 1964 , 1966 ). Our study illustrates that there are limiting factors to a more strategic role for middle managers associated with the professional bureaucracy context. However, role conflict and ambiguity can be mediated by a socialization process, which values incoming identity and personal characteristics ( Van Maanen and Schein, 1979 ).     

The rationality and efficacy of decisions under uncertainty and the value of an experiment

Summary A decision maker faces a known prior distribution over payoff relevant states. We compare the expected utility of this individual under two scenarios. In the first, the decision maker makes a choice without further information. In the second, the decision maker has access to an experiment before choosing an action. However, the decision maker does not know the true joint distribution over states and messages. The value of the experiment as measured by the difference in the two utility levels can be negative as well as positive. We give a condition which is necessary and sufficient for the experiment to be valuable in our sense, for any decision problem.An earlier version of this paper was circulated under the title Noisy Bayes Updating and the Value of Information. We have gained from the comments of Stephen Coate, John Geanakoplos, Larry Samuelson, Timothy Van Zandt and seminar participants at Harvard Business School, Princeton, Boston University, the international conference on game theory at Stony Brook 1992 and the Winter meeting of the Econometric Society at Anaheim 1993. The first author received support for this project from NSF grant #SES-9308515 and a University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation Grant.     

Time to default in the UK mortgage market

This paper employs duration analysis to investigate the timing of default in the UK mortgage market. Our analysis is performed on an ex ante basis, in that our explanatory variables are available to mortgage lenders when the loan is first made. We estimate both standard Weibull distributions and generalizations of the Weibull that permit non-monotonic hazard functions. The models fit the data well, suggesting that we have captured the major sources of variation in duration. We find that ‘cash flow’ variables, such as salary and interest rate paid, play the largest role. Surprisingly, loan-to-value ratios are either insignificant or influence default times in a counter-intuitive direction.