Two tales on human capital and knowledge spillovers: the case of the US and Brazil

This article uses a quasi-Mincerian approach to verify whether the concentration of college-educated individuals employed in the business support services sector and in the own sector contributes to increased productivity in other sectors of the economy. We estimate the returns to education using data from the 2008 US Current Population Survey (March supplement) and from the 2008 Brazilian household survey. This article finds evidence of a positive and significant human capital sectorial spillover effect, which is consistent with Acemoglu’s (1996) conjecture. The sectorial concentration of highly educated workers contributes to increase wages for all workers. This study also finds evidence of increasing returns to education in Brazil and diminishing returns to education in the United States. This finding may be explained by differences in supply of skilled workers in both economies. In addition, the short supply of highly skilled workers in Brazil likely explains the importance of the spillover effect from the business supporting sector.     

Worker Cooperatives in the Theory of the Firm: Marx and Veblen on Technological Determinism

This article contends that, in their treatments of worker cooperatives, the predominant theories of the firm adhere to the logic of technological determinism, and can accordingly be evaluated using the ideas of Thorstein Veblen and Karl Marx. Invoking these patriarchs’ respective distinctions between instrumental and ceremonial institutions and between the technical and social relations of production, the article argues that, contrary to contemporary theories of the firm, worker cooperatives possess an inherent but often latent advantage in implementing bureaucratic organizational structures, enjoying their instrumental/technical benefits for technology and coordination without incurring their ceremonial/social drawbacks for behavior and cooperation.     

政府科技资助对谁更有效?--基于企业规模与所有制三维交互的研究

何种企业能更有效地利用政府科技资助提升创新水平？文章结合资源基础理论、委托代理理论和信号传递理论,运用上海张江高科技园区2382家企业2006—2009年共计6718条非平衡面板数据,研究企业规模和所有制性质在政府科技资助影响企业创新过程中的三维调节机制。研究结果表明：(1)在应用倾向值匹配法纠正政府资助选择偏差的基础上,政府资助对企业创新具有显著的促进作用;(2)企业规模能够影响政府资助对企业创新的“杠杆效应”的发挥程度,规模越大,资助对企业创新水平的正向激励越强;(3)政府资助对不同所有制性质企业的作用存在差异,相比国有企业,非国有性质的企业能更好地利用政府资助提升创新水平;(4)企业规模的调节作用还取决于企业的所有制性质,相比之下,政府资助对非国有企业的创新激励作用会随着企业规模的增加而不断增强。     

The division of labor and the extent of the market

Summary. A firms degree of specialization is modeled as the number of different goods it produces. When a firm chooses its degree of specialization, it faces a tradeoff between the fixed cost and the marginal cost of production. A firms degree of specialization is shown to increase with the extent of the market. Meanwhile, the real wage rate, as a measure of the extent of the market, is endogenously determined in the model and is shown to increase with the division of labor.Received: 29 April 2002, Revised: 18 June 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: A10.The author thanks an anonymous referee and Antonio Ciccone for their very valuable and constructive suggestions. I thank Deborah Minehart, Robert Schwab, and Daniel Vincent for their valuable guidance and advice. I also thank Mingchao Chen, David Selover, and Xiaokai Yang for their helpful advice.     

Government Spending and Welfare with Returns to Specialization

We explore a novel channel through which government spending can stimulate consumption and welfare through its effects on aggregate productivity, without directly affecting either utility or production possibilities. In the presence of monopolistic competition and increasing returns to specialization, it is shown that government spending can partly alleviate the inefficiencies of monopolistic competition. This is because government spending generates an endogenous increase in total factor productivity by increasing the variety of intermediate goods. If the degree of increasing returns to variety is large enough, a rise in such wasteful government spending may increase consumption levels enough to increase welfare.
JEL classification : E 60     

Codification,Abstraction, and Firm Differences: A Cognitive Information-based Perspective

Synopsis The resource-based view shares with population ecology, organizational systematics, organizational cladistics, and institutional theory a concern with why firms differ and with what keeps them different. These two questions only have meaning if – as has been the case in the eoclassical theory of the firm – similarities between firms are taken as the default assumption. This paper distinguishes between ontological heterogeneity – differences in the world – and epistemic heterogeneity – differences in the way that the world is construed. Focusing on the latter, it puts forward an argument for taking epistemic heterogeneity between firms as the default assumption. It starts with a general analysis of how living systems make sense of the world. It then goes on to identify the cognitive activities of codification and abstraction as key sources of epistemic heterogeneity. The findings are applied to those systems called firms where a dominant logic allows epistemic heterogeneity to persist. In some case this leads to competitive advantage, in others to a debilitating inertia. The implications for a knowledge-based theory of the firm are briefly explored.     

董事会互动过程(IOP)有效性研究

随着国内企业的迅速发展,董事会制度得到普遍发展。增强董事会的有效性研究成为公司治理研究的重要问题。董事会团队内部成员的互动过程对董事会有效性具有一定的影响,加强董事会有效性研究对于提升董事间的满足感、增强互动合作精神、提高其在公司的影响力等方面具有重要作用。     

关于电子产业技术创新影响因素的实证分析

对中国产业技术创新诱导因素的分析必须在具体的经济、制度环境下进行。以市场集中度、产业内企业规模、产权制度基础、产业开放程度为影响因子,对电子产业的实证分析显示,市场集中度、产权制度变化与产业创新能力的相关性不强,出口与创新负相关,增加产业内大企业的比重、适度增加进口对创新有促进作用。     

The Williamsonian Ambiguity on Authority and Power in Transaction Cost Economics

Power has traditionally been rejected from economics and more particularly from the economics of the firm. Although he proposes building an interdisciplinary approach to the firm, Williamson rejects power from the economics of transaction costs. However, regarding the theoretical and behavioral hypotheses he makes, we can raise the following question: does the Williamsonian approach to the firm have intrinsic properties for developing a theory of power? After analyzing Williamson’s argument on power/authority, this paper aims to shed light on the fact that the 2009 Williamson, Oliver E. 2009. “Pragmatic Methodology: A Sketch, with Applications to Transaction Cost Economics,” Journal of Economic Methodology 16 (2): 145-157.[Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar] Nobel Prize winner has built a theory based on power that he rejects due to a questionable methodological choice. Conversely, we defend the thesis according to which power cannot be removed from the economics of the firm and transaction cost economics–at the risk of providing a distorted picture of the reality of capitalism.     

企业异质性、规模报酬与劳动力空间流动——基于新新经济地理学的理论研究

文章在对新新经济地理学假设进行拓展的基础上,从理论分析和数值模拟两个层面对企业异质性、规模报酬与劳动力空间流动进行了系统的研究,结论是:地区间企业生产技术水平的不同决定了企业与劳动力的转移方向,企业的生产技术水平与固定成本呈正向变动关系;落后地区和发达地区的发展与彼此对外市场开放相互依赖;由于落后地区总有一定的市场需求,棒—棒均衡在现实中存在的可能性很小。     

Digital Platforms and the Nature of the Firm

Abstract:

Digital platforms turn traditional approaches of the firm, which relied on the wage relation to explain the major difference between firm and market, upside down and underline the advantages of coordination through organization over coordination through market. This study aims to propose a definition of the firm able to integrate, besides the integrated firm, also hybrid forms such as networks of subcontractor/subcontracting firms as well as atypical forms such as digital platforms. By reactivating the firm-boundary problem, this article suggests putting valorization by labor at the heart of the firm’s decisions concerning integration. It suggests therefore a general definition of the firm as a techno-institutional center of capital valorization, provided that firms make profits by means of the appropriation of labor incorporated into their (productive, structural, intellectual) capital through institutional arrangements. By stressing the relation of production between the owners of the means of production and the direct producers, the approach of the firm supported here should allow to cover the different existing models of the firm, from the classical firm to hybrid models, around which the boundary debate has revolved, to digital platforms.     

Optimal Product Variety and Economic Growth: The Trade-off between Internal and External Economies of Scale

Received July 17, 2000; revised version received February 1, 2001     

The determinants of Latin American exchange rate regimes

The experience of the last thirty years suggests that a wide range of factors affects policymakers’ choice of exchange rate regime. The initial explanation was that changes in the international sphere dominated domestic policies and strongly influenced how governments decided among the trade-offs. More recently, domestic political factors’ influence on the choice of exchange rate regimes have been emphasized, providing detailed and rich insights into the dynamics of the choice. Neither approach has been entirely successful. Both internal and external factors must be taken into account. This article builds on previous empirical work and takes into account domestic and international influences on the choice of exchange rate regimes in Latin America between 1964 and 1996. In addition, we highlight a variety of ‘interactions’, choices of economic policy that are affected by both national and international pressures and that, in turn, influence the choice of exchange rate regime. The empirical model uses multinomial ordered logit analysis to determine the factors in exchange rate determination and to compare the explanatory of the models with and without the interaction variables.     

Reproducing the Firm: Routines,Networks, and Identity

Firm survival or reproduction does not occur as a matter of course. Especially under circumstances in which uncertainty and equivocality prevail is firm reproduction potentially problematic. Uncertainty prevails when there is insufficient or inadequate information to assess a situation, equivocality when the information available is multiinterpretable. Firm routines, social networks in a firm, and an organization’s identity can explain how a firm reproduces. We offer suggestions as to which of these will contribute to firm reproduction under what circumstances.     

Competition among techniques in the presence of increasing returns to scale

A model of technology diffusion and growth originally proposed by Batten (1987), taking into account the interaction of the supply of and demand for a new product, is modified so as to admit a production technology with increasing returns to scale and the possibility of a competition between two techniques. On the opposite to the case where the production technology of the new technique exhibits decreasing returns, the presence of increasing returns to scale prevent the splitting of the market between two new techniques, and the monopoly position of one technique must obtain. The winning technique may not be the most efficient in terms of its market expansion potential, the outcome of competition depends on initial conditions on production capacity and diffusion.The author wishes to thank Robert Boyer for his helpful advice and remains the sole responsible for all remaining errors and omissions.     

Pricing decisions in a dual channels system with different power structures

This paper investigates the effect of product substitutability and relative channel status on pricing decisions under different power structures of a dual exclusive channel system where each manufacturer distributes its goods through a single exclusive retailer but two goods are substitute. A linear demand based on the utility function of a representative consumer is assumed, and three game scenarios(Manufacturer Stackelberg, Retailer Stackelbeg and Vertical Nash) are examined under symmetric and asymmetric related channel status. It is shown that no power structure is always the best for the entire supply chain though all members on supply chain have incentive to lead the Stackelberg game. Meanwhile, the vertical Nash game is an equilibrium for the members, however, a Prisoner's dilemma necessarily incurs for the entire supply chain because the Retailer Stackelberg or the Manufacturer Stackelberg can gain the better performance than that in vertical Nash for the entire supply chain when the product substitutability is moderate or higher and the asymmetric relative channel status is moderate, while consumers always get the most welfare from the vertical Nash game.