Knowledge capital and the private rate of return to R&D in Japanese manufacturing industries

This paper examines the relationship between R&D investment and the rate of increase of labor productivity in Japanese manufacturing industries, and derives the rate of return to such investment through a Cobb-Douglas production function which explicitly includes knowledge capital stock. It is argued that the rate of return to R&D investment has been much higher than those of alternative investments but has declined in recent years as the dependence on imported technologies has been diminishing after the last half of the 1970's.     

Distance optimization approach to ratio-form efficiency measures in data envelopment analysis

This paper examines the development pattern of the DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) research field using Social Network Analysis. Nine stylized facts are verified: it is shown that the distribution of research performance is highly skewed, satisfying a power law, and that collaborative research activity is concentrated achieving higher performance. Moreover, economics and OR (operations research)/MS (management science) groups developed without collaboration until the 1980s; however, the merger of the two groups began in 1994 with the collaboration of frontier researchers. Now the two groups have merged significantly, but they are still identifiable. Finally, research hubs and the emergence of new groups are examined. Nine stylized facts show that DEA has developed with unique attributes. Although it shares common characteristics with other academic fields, including a highly skewed distribution of publications and expansion of the network over time, the DEA field has had a pattern of development that is different from those of other academic fields. Independent development and interrelated evolution between economics and OR/MS contributed to the exchange of knowledge of these two separate fields.