Finn Organisation and Spatial Dynamics

For the past three years the world economy has suffered a recession. In contrast to earlier global, as well as national,recessions when manufacturing industries were most vulnerable,business services have been signijicantly affected. Not surpris-ingly, this has revived old doubts about the role of services in modern economies. The papers in this section re-examine the problematics associated with the efficiency and productivity of service organisations. Even if the social division of labour is a strong argument to support the growth of service industries, attempts to understand better the connection between service firm location and different ways of internally organising and coordinating production might be one useful direction for future research.     

A General Model of the Behavioral Response to Taxation

This paper generalizes the standard model of how taxes affect the labor-leisure choice by allowing individuals to change both their labor supply and avoidance effort in response to tax changes. Doing so reveals that the income and substitution effect of taxes depend on both preferences and the avoidance technology. Econometric analysis will not in general allow one to separately identify the two influences, unless one can specify observable determinants of the cost of avoidance. The effective marginal tax rate on working must be modified by the addition of an avoidance-facilitating effect, which measures how the cost of avoidance changes with higher income. This model provides a conceptual structure for evaluating to what extent, and in what situations, the opportunities for tax avoidance mitigate the real substitution response to taxation.     

Are property rights enough?Re‐evaluating a big‐bang claim1

We investigate the claim made by proponents of the big‐bang strategy that the establishment of property rights in an economy in transition creates its own demand for the enforcement of laws to protect those rights. Our model contains a government engaging in activities to accomplish objectives that depend on public support for the enforcement of the rule of law and agents who interpret the level of activities of the government as indications of the government's intent to enforce the rule of law. Agents, using the level of government activities as an input to their decisions, choose whether to support the government's objectives. We establish conditions under which the level of activities chosen by the government maximizes its benefits, and simultaneously induces the constituency to support enforcement of the rule of law. These conditions provide a basis for the argument for the implementation of the big‐bang policy. When these conditions do not hold, however, we show that the level of activities that maximizes the government's benefits may have only a minor impact on support for the enforcement of the rule of law. Two characteristics play an important role in these conditions: the initial level of crime and the types of activities the government chooses to undertake. We present examples showing that the initial level of crime has the more dramatic effect on subsequent support for the rule of law.     

The characteristics of takeover targets q and other measures

This study attempts to assess differences in the financial characteristics of target and non-target firms using logit analysis and a case-control methodology in which control groups are matched by size or industry. The results indicate that unregulated non-financial target firms are characterized by low $\text{q}$ ratios (market/replacement values) and to a lesser extent high current financial liquidity. Measures of financial leverage were not found to be significant.     

A Model of Declining Standards

This paper presents a model in which relative standing determines standards. There are three kinds of agents in the model: candidates who wish to pass a test, members of the elite who have passed the test, and the judge who decides who passes. In order to pass, a candidate's performance must be at least as good as the performance of a representative member of the elite. Without perturbations in the underlying data, the model predicts that standards will not change. Perturbations in the preferences used to judge candidates lead to a reduction in standards.     

The limits to IPR standardization policies as evidenced by strategic patenting in UMTS

The impact of patents and patent royalties are a major concern of standards setting organizations. This study examines the patents filed in the standardization of UMTS, the third-generation mobile phone technology developed under sponsorship of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) and others, using a patent policy developed in response to issues faced in the earlier GSM (née Group Special Mobile) standardization. After contrasting firm strategies and policy effectiveness between the GSM and UMTS efforts, the paper reviews the potential impact of potential changes to the ETSI IPR (intellectual property rights) policy.     

Commercializing Open Science: Deep Space Communications as the Lead Market for Shannon Theory, 1960–73

Recent research on the commercialization of scientific discoveries has emphasized the use of formal intellectual property rights (notably patents) as a mechanism for aligning the academic and entrepreneurial incentives for commercialization. Without such explicit intellectual property rights and licensing, how is such open science commercialized? This paper examines the commercialization of Claude Shannon's theory of communications, developed at and freely disseminated by Bell Telephone Laboratories. It analyses the first 25 years of Shannon theory, the role of MIT in developing and extending that theory, and the importance of deep space communications as the initial market for commercialization. It contrasts the early paths of two MIT‐related spinoffs that pursued this opportunity, including key technical and business trajectories driven by information theory. Based on this evidence, the paper provides observations about commercializing open science, particularly for engineering‐related fields.