Entry restrictions and the determination of quality

Entry restrictions are a common form of regulation in markets and occupations, either as a means of limiting the size of a market or affecting the quality of products or services provided by it. This paper analyzes demand, cost and informational characteristics that affect the impact of this type of policies on the quality mix of products provided by an industry and the welfare of its consumers. Selective increases in the costs of entry such as licensing requirements and direct restrictions with competitive bidding for entry rights are considered. We analyze the effects of these policies on entry decisions and also the additional selection effects that are obtained when exit is allowed for and the rights to participate in an industry can be freely traded.     

Public Investment, Congestion, and Private Capital Accumulation

This paper analyses the impact of public investment on the dynamics of private capital formation in an intertemporal optimising market-clearing framework. The key feature characterising the analysis is that the public good is treated as a durable capital good, subject to congestion. We show how in the presence of congestion the effect of government investment on private capital formation involves a tradeoff between the degree of substitution between private and public capital in production and the degree of congestion. Both lump-sum and distortionary tax financing are considered, with this tradeoff being tightened in the latter case     

Parallel Neutrality

This paper develops the notion of parallel-neutral technical change for inputs and outputs. It is shown that parallel-neutral technical change generalizes existing radial notions of neutral technical change. A taxonomy of the structural consequences of parallel-neutral technical change is developed.     

Intertemporal Budget Policies and Macroeconomic Adjustment in Indebted Open Economies

This paper analyzes the role of government intertemporal budget policies in a growing open economy including nominal assets in the presence of an upward sloping supply of debt. This introduces transitional dynamics that influence the effects of government policy instruments on economic growth and the long term fiscal liability. It is shown that capital income taxes or a combination of tax‐cum‐expenditure or government expenditure alone can balance the long term intertemporal government budget constraint. However, those results are shown to depend critically upon the extent of distortion in capital flows brought about the upward sloping supply of debt.     

Robust tests for time-invariant individual heterogeneity versus dynamic state dependence

We derive tests for persistent effects in a general linear dynamic panel data context. Two sources of persistent behavior are considered: time-invariant unobserved factors (captured by an individual random effect) and dynamic persistence or “state dependence” (captured by autoregressive behavior). We will use a maximum likelihood framework to derive a family of tests that help researchers learn whether persistence is due to individual heterogeneity, dynamic effect, or both. The proposed tests have power only in the direction they are designed to perform, that is, they are locally robust to the presence of alternative sources of persistence, and consequently, are able to identify which source of persistence is active. A Monte Carlo experiment is implemented to explore the finite sample performance of the proposed procedures. The tests are applied to a panel data series of real GDP growth for the period 1960–2005.     

Sources of the great moderation: A time-series analysis of GDP subsectors

Recent work finds evidence that the volatility of the U.S. economy fell dramatically around the first quarter of 1984. We trace the timing of this so-called “Great Moderation” across many subsectors of the economy in order to better understand its root cause. We find that the interest rate sensitive sectors generally experience a much earlier volatility decline than other large sectors of the economy. The changes in Federal Reserve stabilization policies that occurred during the early 1980s support the view that an improved monetary policy played an important role in stabilizing real economic activity. We find only mild evidence that “good luck” was important and little evidence to support the claim that improved inventory management was important.     

Evaluating the risk of patent infringement by means of semantic patent analysis: the case of DNA chips

In this paper, we are going to present a method for detecting the risks of patent infringement by evaluating similarities between patent documents on the basis of semantic patent analysis. This approach enables the user to visualize similarities in the contents on a semantic patent map by means of multi‐dimensional scaling. The effectiveness of the semantic patent map has already been demonstrated by Dressler (2006) with regard to patents of seal technology, in which documents are commonly kept short and the extracted contents are concise. This paper will open out to the field of biotechnology, where patents can easily comprise several hundreds of pages. The method presented here conveys an interdisciplinary approach and combines computer‐aided natural language processing with domain‐specific expertise of biochemical processes. This is illustrated by an authentic case of infringement involving two manufacturers of DNA chips. Our experiment will show how the infringement case is visualized on a patent map based on semantic patent analysis. This experiment can be compared with the search for a needle in a haystack, the two competitive patents representing significantly conflicting ‘needles.’ From an approximate number of 4,000 patents in the current US Class 435/6, a set of patents was selected that included the ‘needles’ mentioned. This paper will point out how such mutual interference can be detected by way of semantic patent analysis, and what advice may be given to R&D managers who are faced with the risk of patent infringement.