URBANIZATION, URBAN CONCENTRATION AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

An international comparative study of the relations among the process of urbanization, urban concentration and economic development, and income distribution was performed by using data of developing and developed countries. Cross-section analyses at certain time periods for capturing "long-run" effects as well as time-series analyses for some countries for "short-run" effects were done taking advantage of the "rectangular" array of data. There were several interesting results: the pattern of unemployment rate in most developing countries shows an inverted-U shaped curve with respect to the degree of urbanization; the pattern of urban concentration is in the form of an inverted-U with respect to the economic development level; and the degree of inequality of income distribution seems to react in an inverted-U form to the variances in the extent of urbanization.     

THE ECONOMIC EFFECT OF HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS FOR THE U.K., GERMANY AND JAPAN

This paper attempts to estimate the marginal productivity of highway construction in the U.K., Germany and Japan during the 15 years following the first oil crisis. In addition, highway-improvement policy in Japan is evaluated using a simple macro-economic regression model. The following conclusions were obtained: in every country the marginal productivity of highway construction decreased over the period 1975-85, with the decrease most pronounced in Japan; subsequently, it increased slowly in the U.K. and Germany, with Japan leveling off though still having the highest value among the three countries; the U.K. maintained a high level of highway productivity largely as a result of a high degree of utilization. There is scope in Japan for attaining a higher level (approximately equal to that of the late 1970s) if the extent of highway utilization can be maintained by additional construction. This implies that future highway-construction policy should be of efficiency-seeking nature.     

The Contents-Based Website Classification for the Internet Advertising Planning: An Empirical Application of the Natural Language Analysis

This study proposes a model for website classification using website content, and discusses applications for the Internet advertising (ad) strategies. Internet ad agencies have a vast amount of ad-spaces embedded in websites and have to choose which advertisements are feasible for place. Therefore, ad agencies have to know the properties and topics of each website to optimize advertising submission strategy. However, since website content is in natural languages, they have to convert these qualitative sentences into quantitative data if they want to classify websites using statistical models. To address this issue, this study applies statistical analysis to website information written in natural languages. We apply a dictionary of neologisms to decompose website sentences into words and create a data set of indicator matrices to classify the websites. From the data set, we estimate the topics of each website using latent Dirichlet allocation, which is fast and robust method for sparse matrices. Finally, we discuss how to apply the results obtained to optimize ad strategies.     

Academic commercialization and changing nature of academic cooperation

Recent economic policies emphasize the role of academic science in technological innovation and economic growth and encourage universities and individual academics to engage in commercial activities. In this trend of academic commercialization, a growing concern has been expressed that its potential incompatibility with the traditional norms of open science could undermine the cooperative climate in academia. Drawing on the framework of evolution of the cooperation, this study examines the changing nature of academic cooperation under the current policy trend. In an ideal state of open science, academics are supposed to cooperate gratis and unconditionally. However, results predict that the commercialized regime could compromise underlying mechanisms of cooperation and allow defectors to prevail. As the trend further grows, academics would become more demanding of direct reward in exchange for cooperation, and they would refrain from engaging in cooperation but would prefer to work independently. Some interventions (e.g., centralized rewarding) could mitigate the problem but require delicate system design.