The impact of product subsidies on plant-level total factor productivity in Britain, 1997–2014

The United Kingdom’s imminent departure from the European Union provides the opportunity for a more selective industrial strategy. This paper therefore analyses the effect of product subsidies on productivity in British manufacturing plants between 1997 and 2014 in order to provide evidence on the desirability of extending their use. The results suggest that low rates of subsidization had either a positive or no effect but higher rates had a negative effect on total factor productivity in some sectors. This implies that increasing the generosity of subsidies does not offer a means of improving the UK’s productivity performance.     

Carbon Lorenz curves

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, it exhibits that standard tools in the measurement of income inequality, such as the Lorenz curve and the Gini-index, can successfully be applied to the issues of inequality measurement of carbon emissions and the equity of abatement policies across countries. These tools allow policy-makers and the general public to grasp at a single glance the impact of conventional distribution rules such as equal caps or grandfathering, or more sophisticated ones, on the distribution of greenhouse gas emissions. Second, using the Samuelson rule for the optimal provision of a public good, the Pareto-optimal distribution of carbon emissions is compared with the distribution that follows if countries follow Nash–Cournot abatement strategies. It is shown that the Pareto-optimal distribution under the Samuelson rule can be approximated by the equal cap division, represented by the diagonal in the Lorenz curve diagram.     

Regulation of product safety design through product testing

The indirect regulation of product safety design through pre-market testing is common with pharmaceuticals and other products containing chemical ingredients. We model this problem as a three stage game in which the firm begins by designing safety, next the government supervises a testing process, and finally the firm markets the product if it is approved. We characterize and compare the Nash and the two leadership equilibria of this game, analyze the comparative statics of these solutions, and consider the effects of regulatory misbehavior. We show that the effects of regulatory misbehavior depend crucially the type of firm-regulator interaction.The author thanks D. Craswell, S. Dasgupta, T. Gilligan, J. Matsusaka, J. Ye, and M. Zupan. Benefit was also derived from two anonomous referees and seminar participants at the University of California, Riverside, and The University of Southern California. Generous research support was provided by the     

Technological change in energy systems: Learning curves, logistic curves and input-output coefficients

Learning curves have recently been widely adopted in climate-economy models to incorporate endogenous change of energy technologies, replacing the conventional assumption of an autonomous energy efficiency improvement. However, there has been little consideration of the credibility of the learning curve. The current trend that many important energy and climate change policy analyses rely on the learning curve means that it is of great importance to critically examine the basis for learning curves. Here, we analyse the use of learning curves in energy technology, usually implemented as a simple power function. We find that the learning curve cannot separate the effects of price and technological change, cannot reflect continuous and qualitative change of both conventional and emerging energy technologies, cannot help to determine the time paths of technological investment, and misses the central role of R&D activity in driving technological change. We argue that a logistic curve of improving performance modified to include R&D activity as a driving variable can better describe the cost reductions in energy technologies. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the top-down Leontief technology can incorporate the bottom-up technologies that improve along either the learning curve or the logistic curve, through changing input-output coefficients. An application to UK wind power illustrates that the logistic curve fits the observed data better and implies greater potential for cost reduction than the learning curve does.     

略论产品责任和产品质量责任之比较

产品责任是一种特殊的民事侵权责任.分散在《产品质量法》、《消费者权益保护法》、《民法通则》等法律中的相关法律条款构建了我国的产品责任制度.与产品责任相比,产品质量责任是由我国《产品质量法》新规定的一个概念,两者的性质不能等同.笔者认为从法律责任的概念以及相关法律条文的规定来看,产品质量责任应当是一种公法责任.     

Technology product evolution and the diffusion of new product features

The evolution of technology products can be analysed on multiple levels. Product categories go through continuous evolution determined by the cumulative changes in the features of new product models. This is manifested in the diffusion of new product features and in the increasingly vague boundaries between different product generations. This article develops an approach for planning and forecasting technology product evolution and the diffusion of new product features. This is achieved by isolating the phenomena underlying the evolution process, and formulating the process at the product category, product feature, and product model levels. The approach is derived from these formulations combining the primarily demand-driven product category diffusion and product unit replacement behaviour, and the more supply-driven product feature dissemination. The approach enables meaningful sensitivity analysis including the analysis of discontinuities. The developed approach is applied to characterise the evolution of an example product category of mobile handsets and to forecast the diffusion of mobile handset features using extensive longitudinal and cross-sectional data collected from Finland. In consequence, the process of technology product evolution and the phenomenon of product feature dissemination are suggested as extensions to research on product category diffusion and replacement.     

Recent approaches to estimating Engel curves

Classical approaches of estimating cross-section Engel curves are based on parametric models. However, misspecification of a parametric model implies that information of structural nature might be masked. An alternative avoiding problems related to predetermined functional relations is the nonparametric approach. This paper surveys recent advances of nonparametric statistics in their relevance to estimating cross-section Engel curves.     

A Microeconometric note on product innovation and product innovation advertising

This paper seeks to explain why more than half of the German service sector firms that introduce a product innovations do not advertise their new or markedly improved product. One part of the explanation is that they do not need to advertise because they are closely related to their customers anyway, and another part of the explanation is that product innovation and product innovation advertising are strategic substitutes.     

The influence of development experience and product innovativeness on product outcome

This empirical study of high-technology product performance shows the influence of experience and product innovativeness on product success.In a logistic analysis of 162 product successes and failures, building on market and technical experience were significant predictors of success. An interaction between technical and market experience was also found to be highly significant. This study empirically validates the value of exparience building in successful product development, and reinforces the need for organizational mechanisms to retain and transfer product deuelopment learning.     

Persistence of product innovation: comparing breakthrough and incremental product innovation

In this paper we examine whether and to what extent breakthrough and incremental product innovation is persistent at the firm level. Drawing on a panel database created from the Community Innovation Survey (CIS) we find that lagged breakthrough product innovation ‘new to the market’, has a significant and positive influence on firms’ ability to develop current breakthrough innovation, while this is not the case for incremental-product innovation ‘only new to the firm’. Our findings show that the dynamics of innovation persistence differ across types of (product) innovations.     

Demographic versus expenditure flexibility in Engel curves

We consider the effects of demographic and expenditure variables on consumer demand in a system of Engel curves using a smooth coefficient semiparametric model where the expenditure effects on the budget shares vary nonparametrically with demographic variables such as the age of head and number of children in the household. Our findings, based on UK micro data, suggest that with a smooth coefficient semiparametric model there is no need for nonlinear logarithmic expenditure effects in the budget shares. Furthermore, we find evidence of a trade-off between demographic and expenditure effects in Engel curves and that a rank-2 system of Engel curves where the logarithmic expenditure effects are allowed to vary with demographic characteristics either nonparametrically or as a third degree polynomial function cannot be rejected against a rank-3 (quadratic logarithmic) model. The implications on household behavior and welfare are also examined. We would like to thank an anonymous referee and Baldev Raj, the editor, for useful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank the University of Cyprus for financial support, Theofanis Mamuneas for stimulating discussions and the Office of National Statistics for making available the UK Family Expenditure Survey data through the ESRC Data Archive. The last author would also like to acknowledge the financial support from SSHRC of Canada.     

Rational expectations and the short-run Phillips curves

The purpose of the present paper is to study certain derivable implications of the rational expectations hypothesis (REH) in the context of a simultaneous wage-price model of the U.S. economy and to subject the REH to statistical tests. The empirical evidence indicates that implementation of the REH in the context of these models does wipe out the conventional short-run Phillips curves, and the assumption that public expectations of future rates of inflation are true conditional mathematical expectations based on all available information is indeed borne out quite well against its alternatives.     

Constrained nonparametric regression analysis of load curves

In this paper, we analyze household load curves through the use of Constrained Smoothing Splines. These estimators are natural smoothing splines that allow to incorporate periodic shape constraints. Since the time pattern of electricity demand combines strong periodical regularities with abrupt changes along time, a nonparametric regression estimator that is able to incorporate regularity constrains appears to be very well suited to approach load curves. In the paper we also propose a method to compute the penalty parameters that appear in the constrained smoothing spline estimator, we show some statistical properties and finally we construct confidence intervals. First version received: February 1998/final version accepted: July 1999     

Functional form of engel curves for foodstuffs

Employing individual household expenditure data for six foodstuffs we test five three-parameter and four two-parameter Engel curves against a more general form. All two-parameter functions must be rejected, including Working's function; it appears that a transformation of the budget share is in order to capture the observed curvature.     

Decomposition of s‐concentration curves

Abstract. For any given order of inverse stochastic dominance, standard concentration curves are decomposed into three components, called contribution curves. Those components correspond to within‐group inequalities, between‐group inequalities, and transvariational inequalities. We prove, for all orders, that contribution curve dominance implies systematically welfare‐improving tax reforms and conversely. Accordingly, as welfare expansions may be costly in terms of particular inequalities, we propose targeted fiscal reforms.