Shocks,financial dependence and efficiency: Evidence from U.S. and Canadian industries

This paper investigates how changes in industries’ funding costs affect total factor productivity (TFP) growth. Based on panel regressions using data for U.S. and Canadian industries and industries’ dependence on external funding as an identification mechanism, we show that increases in the cost of funds affect TFP growth negatively. The effect is non‐monotonic depending on a sector's external finance need. This paper presents a theoretical model that produces the observed non‐monotonic effect of financial shocks on TFP growth and suggests that financial shocks distort the allocation of factors across firms even within an industry, thus reducing TFP growth.     

The impact of FDI on host countries: the analysis of selected service industries in the Visegrad countries

Foreign direct investments are substantial in the services sector in the Visegrad countries. In this article, we analyse the impact of FDI on the host economy in four selected service industries in two areas: export and employment. FDI in the four selected service industries differ in terms of their vertical or horizontal nature: in business services FDI is predominantly vertical; in financial services and telecommunications it is predominantly horizontal; while in computer-related service activities both types can be found. According to our results, the impact on the host economy differs in the four service industries. We found a positive and significant impact on exports in vertical business services and in horizontal telecommunications services, and on employment in business services and, to a lesser extent, in financial services. The positive impact either diminished or disappeared during the global recession of 2008–2009. The comparison of the four Visegrad countries demonstrates the heterogeneous intensity and significance of this impact, indicating their different specialisations in the analysed services industries.     

大型国有企业专利竞争力研究

在市场经济的今天,只有掌握核心技术,注重技术创新的企业才能更好地生存和发展下去。专利技术不仅为企业创造竞争优势,而且作为知识经济时代新的生产要素从根本上影响着行业的竞争结构。我国企业尤其是大型国有企业的经营目的不只是营利,更在于引导我国产业结构升级和培育新兴产业,为此,在相关领域内需要起带头作用,在研发和创新方面投入大量人力、财力。如何在众多的研发领域中选择最优领域,如何评价相关技术创新活动,事关国有企业的发展和产业成果的转化,最终影响的是整个国家的经济发展。文章将探讨大型国有企业尤其是电力企业如何在众多专利评价指标体系和方法中选择最适合自身发展的体系和方法,利用专利形成抢先优势,带动相关行业的发展。     

US PATENT CITATIONS DATA AND INDUSTRIAL KNOWLEDGE SPILLOVERS

The aim of this paper is to empirically evaluate the US interindustry knowledge spillover using the NBER patents data file (1963–1999). Reputing the patent backward citations as a good proxy of the patent's knowledge spillover, we proceed by building a time series to each US manufacturing industry patent citations and their lags. Then, we generate the time series of the external and the internal knowledge flow indices, showing that traditional sectors are more technology-dependent from the others than the new one. Here, in the spirit of Pavitt [Pavitt, Research Policy 13, 343–73, 1984]. We derive a new taxonomy of innovation focusing on the ideas instead of the goods production in order to obtain the innovation linkage and trajectories. Once we determined that each sector's most cited patents are typically belong to the ‘new’ sectors, we evaluate the high- and low-tech sectors innovation effect on the whole economy innovation process. Confirming that the high-tech sectors, and its R&D expenditures, are the most important, we conclude that it is the giant's shoulders, substance of the whole economy.     

University IPRs and knowledge transfer: is university ownership more efficient?

This paper addresses an issue that has been largely ignored so far in the empirical literature on the role of patents in university–industry knowledge transfer: does it matter who owns the patents on university research? We observe that especially in Europe, many patents in which university researchers are listed as inventors are not owned by the university. From a literature review, we conclude that private ownership of university patents may reduce the efficiency of the knowledge transfer process. This hypothesis is put to an empirical test, using data on patents in six European countries. Specifically, we assess whether university-owned patents (in Europe) are more often applied, and/or more economically valuable, than university-invented (but not-owned) patents. Our results indicate that, after correcting for observable patent characteristics, there are only very small differences between university-owned and university-invented patents in terms of their rate of commercialization or economic value.     

MACROECONOMIC POLICY REFORMS AND PRODUCTIVITY GROWTH IN AFRICAN AGRICULTURE

This article employs a two‐stage procedure to investigate the impact of macroeconomic policy reforms on the agricultural productivity growth of 33 African countries from 1981 to 2001. In the first stage, we measure agricultural productivity using a nonparametric Malmquist productivity index. In the second stage, we build a generalized method of moments (GMM) model with a measure of structural adjustment program (SAP) intensity as a key instrument for macroeconomic policy reforms. We also control for the effects of globalization, civil violence, level of development of physical and financial infrastructure, and other economic variables as well as natural resource factors that directly affect agricultural productivity. Our results indicate a strong positive correlation between the extent of SAP intensity and agricultural productivity, suggesting that the macroeconomic policy reforms improved agricultural productivity growth in the sample countries. (JEL E6, O13, O41)     

Exchange rate disconnect and financial constraints —evidence from Chinese firms

One puzzling observation in international economics is the lack of response of exports to exchange rate fluctuations. Employing the most comprehensive export data from China for the 2000–2007 period, we provide sector- and firm-level evidence that the response of exports to exchange rate movements depends crucially on the level of financial constraints. For sectors with large financial constraints, the response is small, whereas, for less financially constrained sectors, the response can be much larger, with the estimated elasticity decreasing with the sector's degree of financial constraints. At the firm-level, financial constraints affect the firm's response to exchange rate shocks at both the intensive and the extensive margins. At the intensive margin, financial constraints dampen the effect of exchange rate on exports by restricting the firm's export value to the existing destination market; at the extensive margin, financial constraints restrict the number of firms participating in exporting, the number of firm-product pairs being exported, and the probability of entering a new destination market.     

On the role of domestic and international financial cyclical factors in driving economic growth

ABSTRACT

We investigate the effects of (domestic and international) financial cyclical factors on the US business cycle over the period 1890–2013 using an augmented stochastic version of the neoclassical growth model. In our setting, financial factors enter as determinants of the total factor productivity cyclical pattern. By means of static and dynamic estimations we find that (i) the inclusion of financial cyclical factors improves the model’s performance; (ii) the sensitivity of economic growth to financial factors is time-varying; (iii) domestic financial factors have a key role in explaining short-run output fluctuations only in the first half of the 20th century; (iv) US business cycle fluctuations have been mainly driven by global financial factors (i.e., financial integration) over the last three decades.

JEL CODES: O40, E32, C32     

BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL METHOD PATENTS, INNOVATION, AND POLICY

Court decisions in the 1990s are widely viewed as having opened the door to a flood of business method and financial patents at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and to have also impacted other patent offices around the world. A number of scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decisions themselves. This paper reviews the history of business method and financial patents briefly and then explores what economists know about the relationship between the patent system and innovation, in order to draw some tentative conclusions about their likely impact. It concludes by finding some consensus in the literature about the problems associated with this particular expansion of patentable subject matter, highlighting the remaining areas of disagreement, and reviewing the various policy recommendations.     

Finance and industry: the case of Greece

This article argues that the Greek banking system contributed to the emergence of a weak, uncompetitive, and ultimately highly inefficient industrial sector. This inefficiency is quantified with the help of translog cost-curve estimates for 68 firms in eight industries. The estimation shows that Greek firms operate at too small a scale, relative to their capacity, and do not exploit scale economies. It was the structure of the financial sector, as it operated within the specific political context, that led to processes that dampened competition and ultimately distorted the country's development. The financial sector's behaviour is conditioned by three structural facets: it is an oligopoly; it possesses an internal hierarchy which is fully vertical; and it is state-owned. That the financial process led to inefficiency is confirmed by examining the counterexample of efficient industrial configurations. In this case, efficient industries were able to deny the potentially harmful policies of the financial sector. In conclusion, the structure of the financial sector, and by extension the structure of the state itself, played an important role in the Greek economy.     

Passthrough of Exchange Rate and Tariffs into Import Prices of India: Currency Depreciation versus Import Liberalization*

This paper examines the extent of passthrough of exchange rate and tariff changes into import prices using sectoral panel data (at the two‐digit SITC level) for the post‐reform period in India (1990–2001). After having controlled for unobserved effects that might have an impact on the import prices by using sector dummies, we find that on average exchange rate passthrough (ERPT) is a dominant effect compared to tariff rate passthrough (TRPT) in explaining changes in India's import prices. The sectoral panel results suggest that the passthrough of exchange rates and tariff rates varies across products. ERPT into import prices is significant in 12 industries, whereas TRPT is significant only in six industries, with full passthrough. However, ERPT is incomplete only in four industries, but TRPT is incomplete in 36 industries, which means that firms exporting to India more frequently adopt strategies to maintain their market share against tariffs than against exchange rate changes. The sectoral differences in passthrough seem to be related to the sector's share in total imports and the sector's effective protection rate. Hence, India's relatively high levels of protection have an impact on the behavior of foreign exporters.     

Economic prospects and policies in Mexico

This paper focuses on Mexico's possibilities in the world economy, especially in North America. Any successful policy must reorient Mexico's development away from oil and import substitution and toward exports. Proposed reforms would involve (1) devaluing the exchange rate and unifying the official and free-market exchange rates; (2) liberalizing imports by abolishing import restrictions, eliminating official import reference prices, and reducing those tariffs exceeding 40 percent; (3) reducing the existing bias against exports of the incentive system; and (4) limiting the public sector's influence in the economy by reducing the public sector deficit, liberalizing the financial sector, and denationalizing public firms outside basic industries.     

Internet start-ups access to the bank loan market: evidence from Italy

The analysis of the bank sector's ability to efficiently fuel the birth of new Italian business ventures in Internet-related services is studied. In particular, through the specification and the estimate of a series of econometric models, this paper aims at investigating which characteristics of a large sample of Internet start-ups and their relative founders facilitate access to the loan market. More precisely, the role played by founders’ human capital as a possible significant signal used by banks to evaluate investment projects is addressed. Estimation results suggest that highly qualified human resources possessed by Internet founders do not represent an important driver for gaining access to bank credit and they do not affect the amount of the incurred debt.     

ICT and Productivity in Europe and the United States Where Do the Differences Come From?

In this paper we analyse labour productivity growth in 51 industriesin European countries and the United States. Using shift-sharetechniques we identify the industries in which the U.S. is leadingmost strongly. With a detailed decomposition analysis we identifywhether the sources of the U.S. advantage are due to fasterproductivity growth, higher industry productivity levels relativeto the country aggregate, different employment shares or fasterchange in employment shares of rapidly growing industries. Theresults show that U.S. productivity has grown faster than inthe EU because of a larger employment share in the ICT producingsector and faster productivity growth in services industriesthat make intensive use of ICT. Wholesale and retail trade andthe financial securities industry account for most of the differencein aggregate productivity growth between the EU and the U.S.(JEL N10, O47, O57)     

Skill Intensity in Foreign Trade and Economic Growth

This paper explores the link between trade structure, trade specialization and per capita income growth. It is argued that industrial upgrading in export specialization patterns has a positive long-run growth effect, while the effect of structural change in industrial import patterns is in principle ambiguous. A standard empirical growth model is augmented by various measures of structural change. The hypothesis that not trade per se matters, but that various types of trading activities impact differently on economic growth is tested on a sample of 45 countries (OECD members and selected Asian and Latin American countries) over the period 1981–1997. The data set comprises exports and imports for 35 manufacturing industries at the 3-digit level of the ISIC classification which are grouped according to skill intensity. The results of the dynamic panel estimation point towards a positive long-run growth effect arising from trade specialization in medium-high-skill-intensive industries. Further, important distinctions between the skill intensity of export and import patterns and their respective influence on economic development, as well as between the group of developing countries and OECD members are observed in this relationship.JEL classification: C23, F43, O19, O41, O57The author is grateful to Michael Landesmann and Robert Stehrer (wiiw), Neil Foster and Jesús Crespo Cuaresma (Department of Economics, University of Vienna), Michael Peneder (Austrian Institute of Economic Research) and two referees for valuable comments. This research is based on Jubiläumsfondsprojekt Nr. 8954, financial support by Oesterreichische Nationalbank is gratefully acknowledged.     

Does the position in the inter-sectoral knowledge space affect the international competitiveness of industries?

ABSTRACT

This paper empirically investigates how the inter-sectoral knowledge flows affect the international competitiveness of industries, once controlling for both cost and other technological factors. Using patent data on 14 manufacturing industries in 16 OECD countries over the period 1995–2009, we apply a network-based approach to capture the effect of industries' position in the flows of technical knowledge across industries, which we label inter-sectoral knowledge space. We find that (i) centrality and local clustering in the inter-sectoral knowledge space positively affect the export market shares of an industry, (ii) such two effects are rather redundant and (iii) national-level knowledge flows' impacts on international competitiveness are way stronger than international ones. Network measures of position in the knowledge space are found to be more relevant than standard technological indicators such as patent counts. Our results point to the importance of industries being well located in the stream of knowledge flows, rather than being innovative per se, and offer a novel yet robust proxy to measure technological factors affecting trade performances. In addition, we find evidence of geographical boundaries of knowledge flows.     

Appropriation Of Returns From Technological Assets And The Values Of Patents And R&D In Japanese High-Tech Firms †

This paper investigates the extent that technological assets contribute to the value of the firm, using the sample of 90 Japanese firms in pharmaceutical, chemical, and electrical equipment industries. We use the firm's R&D expenditures and the number of patents (in stock) as the measures of its technological assets and show that the relative usefulness of these two measures varies across industries. Particularly, Tobin's q is positively related to the technological assets most strongly in the pharmaceutical industry. It is also most sensitive in this industry to the level of patent stock, coinciding with the view that drug patents are more effective than other patents as a means of appropriating returns from innovation. The communications equipment industry is also characterized by its q's dependence on patent stock. In addition, this industry's q is particularly sensitive to the level of net R&D investment in the most recent year, presumably because of the rapid technological progress in this industry.     

Enterprise life cycle,financial technology and digital transformation of banks—Evidence from China

Financial technology formed by the combination of digital technology and traditional finance is gradually changing the financial services model. The development of financial technology has influenced the behaviour of commercial banks. It has promoted the innovation of commercial banks. And it has promoted the digital transformation of commercial banks. In this paper, it is intended to explore the relationship between financial technology and digital transformation of banks through positive analysis. As well as to explore how the age of enterprises listed and enterprise life cycle affect the relationship between financial technology and digital transformation of banks. This paper conducts an empirical research on the data of China's A-share listed banks from 2011 to 2021 using a two-way fixed effects regression method. The results of the research indicate that financial technology promotes banks' digital transformation. Meanwhile, the age of enterprise listing and enterprise life cycle play a positive moderating role in financial technology promoting banks' digital transformation. In this paper, it is the first time to conduct an empirical research with the number of monthly active users of mobile banking as a proxy variable for digital transformation of banks, which enriches the study of financial technology. It has certain reference value for promoting digital transformation of banks.     

Learning by exporting and high-tech capital deepening in Singapore manufacturing industries, 1974–2006

A number of fundamental factors enhance the growth of industries’ productivity. Among others, the export-led and high-tech capital deepening strategies are widely adopted by developing economies. This article attempts to empirically investigate the extent to which both industrial development policies affect the Total Factor Productivity Growth (TFPG) in Singapore manufacturing industries during the period from 1974 to 2006. Using the panel data estimations, I find that both development strategies bring about TFPG via nonneutral technological growth, and the former more largely explains TFPG than does the latter. This study captures the measure of learning by exporting by the lagged export intensity and therefore contributes to the literature, in which only the case of whether or not firms are active in export markets is conventionally employed. Methodologically, my main contributions are a more detailed treatment of (nonneutral) technological changes, and an alternative measure of export intensity.     

ARE FINANCIAL SECTOR POLICIES EFFECTIVE IN DEEPENING THE MALAYSIAN FINANCIAL SYSTEM?

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the effects of financial sector policies on development of the financial system in Malaysia over the period 1959–2005. The technique of principal component analysis is used to construct a summary measure of interest rate policies in order to account for the joint influence of various interest rate controls imposed on the Malaysian financial system. The results show that economic development, interest rate controls, and capital liquidity requirements positively affect the level of financial development. However, greater trade openness, higher statutory reserve requirements, and the presence of directed credit programs appear to be harmful for development of the Malaysian financial system. The results provide some support to the argument that some form of financial restraints may help promote financial development. (JEL E44, E58, O16, O53)