Industrial interactions and academic patenting: evidence from German scientists

Using a unique survey of scientists at a large public research organization, this paper examines the effects of industry interactions on academic patenting. Two types of collaborations, industrial cooperation and consulting, are considered. Results show that both cooperation and consultancy increase the likelihood of patenting. However, only the positive influence of industrial cooperation stands up to robustness checks. Effects of personal, professional and institutional factors are in line with the literature, yet with some differences across cooperation and consultancy. Implications for research policy concerning academic patenting and challenges that industry may experience are discussed.     

Cigarette demand and effectiveness of U.S. smoking control policies: state-level evidence for more than half a century

Using state-level U.S. data over 1956–2008 this paper examines the demand for cigarettes. The long data span enables us to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of various policies and to examine cigarette demand across individual states. Our results show cigarette demand to be price inelastic, smoking-habit effects to be strong, income effects to be small, and border price effects can be significant. These findings are quite robust across alternate model specifications. None of the three smoking control policies considered (Fairness Doctrine, Broadcast Ban, and Master Settlement Agreement) were shown to be effective in curbing overall smoking, although most were effective in a few states. Policy implications are discussed.     

Cooperative and noncooperative R&D with spillovers: The case of labor-managed firms

This research focuses on the behavior of not-for-profit enterprises. In particular, using a familiar model of cost-reducing R&D with spillovers, we examine strategic interactions between labor-managed firms in a duopoly. Research spillovers have not been previously considered in the context of labor-managed firms. Among four market scenarios involving (i) competition in research and production; (ii) cooperation in research and production; (iii and iv) competition or cooperation in research and the reverse in production, our results show that research is greatest under full cooperation, while output is greatest under full competition. Output and R&D are the lowest in the case when firms compete in research, but form a production cartel. The degree of research spillovers has a crucial bearing upon these rankings. Some of these results differ from those for profit-maximizing firms. The effects of changes in research spillovers on employment (output) are shown to depend upon the nature of the underlying production technology. Policy implications are discussed.     

Advertising media and cigarette demand

Using state-level panel data for the USA spanning three decades, this research estimates the demand for cigarettes. The main contribution lies in studying the effects of cigarette advertising disaggregated across five qualitatively different groups. Results show cigarette demand to be near unit elastic, the income effects to be generally insignificant and border price effects and habit effects to be significant. Regarding advertising effects, aggregate cigarette advertising has a negative effect on smoking. Important differences across advertising media emerge when cigarette advertising is disaggregated. The effects of public entertainment and Internet cigarette advertising are stronger than those of other media. Anti-smoking messages accompanying print cigarette advertising seem relatively more effective. Implications for smoking control policy are discussed.     

The pace of intermediate‐product introductions

This paper models frequency of introductions of newer generations of an intermediate‐product sold by an upstream ‘developer’ firm to downstream manufacturer firms. The manufacturers use the intermediate product to manufacture final products, and are heterogeneous in the time it takes them to develop and introduce final products based on the latest generation of the intermediate product. This downstream heterogeneity could arise, for example, from heterogeneity in manufacturers' technical skills or existing patent regimes. Among other results, we show that the optimal frequency of introduction of the intermediate‐product can increase or decrease in the extent of this downstream heterogeneity. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Feasibility Criteria in Monetary Trade

Consider the problem of how agents in a pure exchange competitive framework acquire their desired bundles of goods through a process of decentralized trade, i.e., in the absence of an auctioneer. Since the agents' wants are not mutually coincident, a medium of exchange is necessary to conduct trade. One relevant question to ask in this context is what property a commodity should possess in order for it to be eligible as a medium of exchange? This note discovers one such attribute, that the good be included in the final consumption vector of each agent. The condition is an improvement over an earlier one due to Ostroy and Starr (1974) which requires each agent to have large quantities of the medium of exchange in her/his initial endowment of commodities. JEL Classification Numbers: D50, E42.     

Medical professionals and health care fraud: Do they aid or check abuse?

This paper examines the role of health care professionals in combating health care fraud. It is not overall clear whether the share of the health professionals help control abuse. Using data across U.S. states, our econometric results show that greater employment of nurses consistently reduced health fraud, whereas more physicians did not have a significant impact. Further, more urbanized states and states with a greater proportion of the elderly experienced greater health scams. Identity thefts facilitated health care fraud, whereas different dimensions of health insurance (including the share of the population with Medicare, managed care, and no insurance) and hospital occupancy rates did not matter.     

Optimal pollution control in a mixed oligopoly with research spillovers

We study optimal pollution abatement under a mixed oligopoly when firms engage in emissions‐reducing research and development (R&D) with imperfect appropriation. The regulator uses a tax to curb emissions. Results show that in a mixed oligopoly, the public firm has positive emissions reduction in equilibrium; however, emissions reductions of the private firm could be positive or zero. Under certain conditions, the optimal pollution tax is positive; otherwise, the tax reverts to a subsidy. Comparing mixed and private duopolies, privatisation leads to reductions in R&D and output, but to an increase in overall emissions, so privatisation tends to make the environment worse.     

Design versus utility innovation: Is corruption sanding or greasing the wheels of innovation?

This paper studies whether corruption has a greasing or a sanding effect on the production of innovation. The main novelty lies in comparing the relative impacts on design versus utility innovation. On the one hand, corruption can undermine (sand) the expected returns from patents, whereas on the other hand, patent holders might be able to increase (grease) the scope and applicability of their patents. Using U.S. state-level data and controlling for bidirectional causality, results show the sanding effect of corruption with regard to utility patents, with the negative effect on design patents occurring only with a time lag.     

Improving social harm indices with a modulated Hawkes process

Communities are affected adversely by a range of social harm events, such as crime, traffic crashes, medical emergencies, and drug use. The police, fire, health and social service departments are tasked with mitigating such social harm through various types of interventions. While various different social harm indices have been proposed for allocating resources to spatially fixed hotspots, the risk of social harm events is dynamic, and new algorithms and software systems that are capable of quickly identifying risks and triggering appropriate public safety responses are needed. We propose a novel modulated Hawkes process for this purpose that offers flexible approaches to both (i) the incorporation of spatial covariates and leading indicators for variance reduction in the case of rarer event categories, and (ii) the capture of dynamic hotspot formation through self-excitation. We present an efficient l1-penalized EM algorithm for estimating the model that performs feature selection for the spatial covariates of each incident type simultaneously. We provide simulation results using data from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department in order to illustrate the advantages of the modulated Hawkes process model of social harm over various recently introduced social harm indices and property crime Hawkes processes.