Domestic Effects of Offshoring High‐skilled Jobs: Complementarities in Knowledge Production

We provide evidence on how changes in the use of high‐skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location affect a firm's domestic use of the same type of worker. We exploit rich data that provide variation in the location of inventors within multinational firms across industries and countries to control for confounding firm–time and industry factors. We find that a 10% increase in the use of foreign inventors leads to a 1.9% increase in the use of domestic inventors. Our results suggest that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.     

The Burden of Knowledge and the "Death of the Renaissance Man": Is Innovation Getting Harder?

This paper investigates a possibly fundamental aspect of technological progress. If knowledge accumulates as technology advances, then successive generations of innovators may face an increasing educational burden. Innovators can compensate through lengthening educational phases and narrowing expertise, but these responses come at the cost of reducing individual innovative capacities, with implications for the organization of innovative activity—a greater reliance on teamwork—and negative implications for growth. Building on this "burden of knowledge" mechanism, this paper first presents six facts about innovator behaviour. I show that age at first invention, specialization, and teamwork increase over time in a large micro-data set of inventors. Furthermore, in cross-section, specialization and teamwork appear greater in deeper areas of knowledge, while, surprisingly, age at first invention shows little variation across fields. A model then demonstrates how these facts can emerge in tandem. The theory further develops explicit implications for economic growth, providing an explanation for why productivity growth rates did not accelerate through the 20th century despite an enormous expansion in collective research effort. Upward trends in academic collaboration and lengthening doctorates, which have been noted in other research, can also be explained in this framework. The knowledge burden mechanism suggests that the nature of innovation is changing, with negative implications for long-run economic growth.     

Pushing Economies (and Students) Outside the Factor Price Equalization Zone

Despite overwhelming empirical evidence of the failure of factor price equalization, most teaching of international trade theory (even at the graduate level) assumes that economies are incompletely specialized and that factor price equalization holds. The behavior of trading economies in the absence of factor price equalization is not well understood, and some major textbook treatments err. The authors map regions of specialization and diversification for standard competitive economies and show how outputs, goods, and factor prices change as economies move within and across different regions of diversification and specialization. Two examples of how the analysis can enrich graduate-level trade teaching are given: the substitutability of goods trade and factor movements, and debates over the trade and inequality.     

TIME‐VARYING EFFECTS OF HUMAN CAPITAL ON MILITARY RETENTION

This paper examines how human capital acquired at the onset of a military career has an evolving effect on retention decisions. Using data of Marine officers that extends across 20‐year horizons, estimates of the hazard related to separation rates indicate that initial differences in general and firm‐specific human capital have time‐varying effects on retention across the duration of a career. Additional evidence suggests that the effects of higher economy‐wide unemployment as well as the onset of wars succeeding from September 2001 also change retention decisions and depend on officers' length of service. (JEL J6, J41, J45)     

学历与首次职位升迁对关键研发者职业生涯上升速度的影响

基于1995—2015年中国家电和汽车行业共40个上市公司（20+20个）的全部发明、实用新型专利数据，提取得到219名关键研发者，并将其创造力类型划分为速成型（创造力上升迅速但下降缓慢）和慢热型（创造力上升缓慢但下降速度快）。然后，从个体属性出发，研究学历和首次职位升迁两个因素对关键研发者职业生涯上升阶段创造力的影响。利用Logit模型进行分析，结果发现：在关键研发者职业生涯上升期，其学历越高，就越有可能是速成型而不是慢热型；关键研发者职业生涯上升期如果发生首次职位升迁，他们更有可能是慢热型而不是速成型。从理论上丰富了关键研发者创造力影响因素研究，对如何实现关键研发者快速成长具有实践指导价值，有助于企业完善关键研发者选拔机制与管理策略。     

The ‘inventor balance’ and the functional specialization in global inventive activities

Inventors and organizational assets are inputs of inventive activities which are often provided at a global scale, where countries might specialize in the provision of one or the other type of inputs. We introduce a new patent-based metric, the ‘inventor balance’, to quantify this type of functional specialization, which we discover to be considerable, and we propose a conceptual framework to explain it. We observe a progressive ‘decoupling’ of national sub-systems providing respectively inventors and organizational assets. Moreover, we find that countries with a high level of innovativeness relative to their economic development, high technological specialization, and strong individualistic cultural traits, contribute relatively more inventors than organizations to the global production of inventions.     

Patterns and determinants of skilled workers’ mobility: evidence from a survey of Italian inventors

Skilled workers’ mobility is considered to be one of the most influential channels of knowledge transmission. This has increased the interest of researchers and policy makers because of its implications for innovation diffusion and, consequently, economic welfare. However, little is still known about the determinants of this phenomenon.

This paper explores the mobility patterns for a group of Italian inventors in the pharmaceutical sector. It addresses methodological issues related to measures of inventors’ mobility through patent statistics and examines the determinants of their mobility choices.

The empirical results indicate that career paths of inventors are rarely reflected in their patenting activity and that using patent statistics frequently underestimates the intensity of the mobility phenomenon. The results also show a positive association between productivity and mobility. In particular, the econometric analysis points out that inventor's personal characteristics, inventive productivity, and geographical location matter for mobility choices.     

行业同质性与事务所行业专门化战略——来自中国审计市场的经验证据

本文考察了在中国审计市场环境下行业特征对事务所行业专门化战略的影响。研究发现,行业同质性越高,事务所在该行业的市场份额和组合份额也越高。该结论表明,行业内客户经营越相似,事务所越容易将行业专门化投资获得的行业知识和行业审计程序在行业内不同客户的审计过程中快速有效地分享,因此,事务所越倾向于在该行业进行专门化投资以获得低成本的竞争优势。本文的研究结论可以为事务所行业专门化投资决策提供经验证据,并为事务所通过行业专门化战略实现做大做强提供有益的途径。     

Runner‐up Patents: Is Monopoly Inevitable?

Exclusive patents sacrifice product competition to provide firms incentives to innovate. We characterize an alternative mechanism whereby later inventors are allowed to share the patent if they discover within a certain time period of the first inventor. These runner‐up patents increase social welfare under very general conditions. Furthermore, we show that the time window during which later inventors can share the patent should become a new policy tool at the disposal of the designer. This instrument will be used in a socially optimal mix with the breadth and length of the patent and could allow sorting between more or less efficient firms.     

Geographical concentration and the dynamics of countries' specialization in technologies

This paper examines the empirical dynamics of countries' technological specialization in six technology fields using distribution dynamics. In all technology fields innovation activities are performed by relatively few countries and the degree of concentration is fairly stable in time. Intra-distribution dynamics is characterized by persistence of within field countries' specialization levels around or below the mean, while high specialization levels revert towards lower values. This strengthens the case for absorptive capacity. Electronics show some distinctive properties: they have the highest degree of geographical concentration and numerous small countries among those specialized; they also are the least mobile technology field. In a Schumpeterian perspective, this is in line with "creative accumulation".     

Corporate transparency, cream-skimming and FDI

We develop a simple information-based model of Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. On the one hand, the relative abundance of “intangible” capital in specialized industries in the source countries, which presumably generates expertise in screening investment projects in the host countries, enhances FDI flows. On the other hand, host-country relative corporate-transparency diminishes the value of this expertise, thereby reducing the flow of FDI. The model also demonstrates that the gains for the host country from FDI [over foreign portfolio investment (FPI)] are reflected in a more efficient size of the stock of domestic capital and its allocation across firms. These gains are shown to depend crucially (and positively) on the degree of competition among FDI investors. We provide also some evidence on the effects of corporate transparency indicators, such as accounting standards, on bilateral FDI flows from a panel of 24 OECD countries over the period of 1981-1998.     

How do prolific inventors impact firm innovation in ICT: implications from patent co-inventing network

Prolific inventors not only own higher innovation productivity, but also impact other inventors through innovation networks. This paper contributes to existing literatures by differentiating prolific inventors from non-prolific inventors in the network context, and making an empirical analysis of the effect of prolific inventors. We use the patent filing data from the State Intellectual Property Office of China (SIPO) in investigating the effect of prolific inventors on firm innovation. We use the patents filed by 10 largest Information & Communication Technology firms during 1995–2010 and establish the innovation network with patent co-inventing data. The empirical result shows that prolific inventors positively impact their partners who used to co-invent at least one patent with them. Furthermore, prolific inventors positively impact inventors who do not have a close contact with them. The closer the inventors are to prolific inventors, the more patents they produce. Members are thereby more likely to gather around prolific inventors and formulate intensive clusters. In networks centered by prolific inventors, useful knowledge outweighs redundant knowledge, and high clustering that facilitates knowledge flow is proved to be beneficial; while in networks without prolific inventors, high clustering may not be beneficial as there are less inventors holding advanced knowledge. Policy implications are discussed at the end of this study.     

What can we learn from the distribution of trade patterns?

This paper proposes an empirical framework for analyzing the dynamics of trade specialization, using a symmetric transformation of the standard Balassa (Manch Sch Econ Soc Stud 33(2):99–123, 1965) index and the conditional density estimation methods suggested by Hyndman et al. (J Comput Graph Stat 5(4):315–336, 1996). The framework is implemented using data on the cross-sector export and import specialization of the four initial EU Cohesion countries over the last 40 years. We discuss the importance of studying both the distribution’s external shape and the intra-distribution dynamics and why it is interesting to include imports in the analysis. We find a reduction of the overall degree of export specialization in Portugal, Greece and Spain. Conversely, Ireland has the strongest export specialization and there is evidence of an increase over time. The export intra-distribution dynamics reveal persistence of the specialization status in the four countries, especially for high values of the index. In all countries, the degree of specialization is higher for exports than for imports and intra-distribution dynamics reveal more mobility of import specialization than that of exports.     

Rethinking the Costs of Economic Growth. Association for Social Economics Presidential Address, 2008

The source of economic development and growth is specialization in the context of comparative advantage. Growth in capital and other inputs, energy use, and technological change are insufficient to explain the magnitude of growth. Earlier critics of economic growth failed to connect growth to specialization, and so were distracted by nostalgia and sentiment. The specialization process itself produces three significant problems. First, as economies become more specialized, they become less flexible. Second, diversity tends to make ecological systems more robust, while specialization weakens them. Third, specialization produces social isolation. Solutions to these problems may be found in participatory, indicative planning.     

Encephalization and division of labor by early humans

We draw on Ricardian comparative advantage between distinct persons to map out the division of labor among proto-humans in a village some 1.7 million years ago. A person specialized in maintaining a cooking fire in the village is of particular interest (Ofek, Second nature, economic origins of human evolution, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2001). We are also interested in modeling hunting by village males in teams. The large issue is whether and how specialization (division of labor) and interpersonal trade might have driven brain-expansion in early humans. We emphasize the need for early humans to develop the capacity to see themselves in others’ shoes (other-regardingness) in order for regularized trading to follow division of labor.     

Who innovates with whom and why? Evidence from international collaboration in energy patenting

ABSTRACT

The use of renewable and alternative energy technologies, which have the potential to reduce carbon emissions worldwide, is limited. Common environmental policy environments may encourage inventors to share the costs and risks needed to develop high quality energy technologies. In this work, I study the propensity to collaboratively innovate by examining counts of renewable energy and alternative energy patents from 1990–2013 that have multiple inventors that are located in more than one country. Results from a gravity model framework suggest that similarity in environmental regulations is an important, positive driver of collaboration in energy technologies. I find that this impact is driven by market-based environmental policies that give inventors the flexibility to seek out international partnerships. I provide evidence that market-based environmental policy similarity may encourage collaboration across geographic and cultural distances but may not encourage collaboration across technologically dissimilar nations.     

Publish or Perish? The Increasing Importance of Publications for Prospective Economics Professors in Austria,Germany and Switzerland

Abstract. Tenure decisions depend, among other factors, on a candidate's career age and publication record. We associate publications with journal articles indexed in EconLit and measure publication output in equivalents of both top‐five journal articles and European Economic Review (EER) articles. We find that the average age of a professor in the year of his/her first appointment is 38, i.e. he or she is appointed approximately eight years after completing the PhD. Between 1970 and 2006, the average publication record at the time of the first appointment is equivalent to 1.5 standardized top‐five articles or 2.3 standardized EER articles. Publication records vary across subfields and have become more substantial over time. We predict that someone aspiring to a tenured position after 2011 should aim at an equivalent of four standardized top‐five articles or six standardized EER articles.     

Profitable Advice: the Value of Information Provided by Canada's Inventor's Assistance Program

Inventors who are considering whether and how to commercialize their inventions. can often avail themselves to evaluations and advice provided by government supported programs initiated to encourage innovation. In Canada. such a service is provided by the Canadian Innovation Centre. through its Inventor's Assistance Program. In its twenty years of operations the IAP has evaluated 11,000 inventions. The fee charged for an invention evaluation was Cdn. $262 in 1995, and these fees covered about half the program's expenses. We compute the expected value of the information the IAP's evaluation provides under different assumptions and scenarios. Under plausible conditions, the value of the information to the inventor is found to be higher than both the fee and the social cost of the program. The implications of some inventors not following the advice given to them by the IAP are briefly explored.     

Welfare,competition, specialization and growth

In this paper we consider a model of horizontal differentiation with a quite general production function and derive the closed form solutions for the level of the variables in the decentralized economy and in the social planner case. This enables us to analyze how consumers’ welfare varies in terms of the degree of competition and the degree of returns to specialization. We find that welfare is increasing in the degree of returns to specialization both in the market economy and in the centralized economy and the decentralized economy's welfare is a bell-shaped function of the degree of competition.     

COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE,PROLIFIC INVENTORS AND THE VALUE OF INVENTIONS: AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF FRENCH,GERMAN AND BRITISH PATENTS IN THE US, 1975–1999

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to test two related hypotheses: The first is that the involvement of both prolific and foreign inventors in the production of knowledge has a direct, positive impact on the collective dimension of this knowledge production as measured by the size of the inventive team. The second is that the involvement of both prolific and foreign inventors has a direct, positive impact on the value of the new knowledge produced. We use detailed information from nearly 300,000 patents granted by the US Patent Office to French, German, and British inventors over the period from 1975 to 1999. From the data available from each patent regarding citations of prior patents and the numbers and identities of the inventors listed in the patent application, we are able to construct measures of collective knowledge, the presence of prolific and foreign inventors, and the imputed value of patents. In a novel approach in this literature, we estimate negative binomial multiple regression models for determining both the size of the collective dimension and the value of the patents. After controlling for the effects of years, technological fields, and patenting country, we find a strong support for the hypothesis that both prolific and foreign inventors tend to be parts of larger teams of inventors and for the hypothesis that prolific and foreign inventors tend to produce inventions having more value. In the conclusion, we draw some implications from these results for knowledge governance.