Rebuilding the R&D engine in big pharma

From December 2000 to February 2008, the top 15 companies in the pharmaceutical industry lost roughly $850 billion in shareholder value. Although a number of factors--including the rise of generics, pricing pressures, regulatory requirements, and legal entanglements--are to blame, Garnier, the CEO of GlaxoSmithKline, believes that declining R&D productivity is his industry's primary problem. The way to solve it, he says, is to return power to the scientists--by reorganizing R&D into highly focused groups headed by inspirational leaders, seeking the best science outside as well as inside a company, fixing broken processes, and promoting a strong culture of innovation and passion for excellence. GSK has replaced its organizational pyramid with 12 "centers of excellence. The company has worked to untangle the quest for breakthrough drugs from the effort to develop best-in-class offerings and has overhauled incentives for the scientists who actually make discoveries. It has also pursued contractual relationships with academia and biotech companies in a bid to secure the best science, wherever it may reside. When the company began a sweeping reengineering of its R&D, it had only two products in late-stage development. Today it has 34--the most in the industry. But much more remains to be done, the author says. Significant cost efficiencies could be achieved by offshoring clinical trials. Development of new blockbuster drugs could be simplified and accelerated if researchers targeted only a limited segment of the potential patient population and then expanded to others over time. The innovation malaise in pharmaceuticals is not unique, Garnier says. Many other industries face the same challenges. A cultural revolution and a broad transformation of the organization are necessary first steps to rebuilding the R&D engine.     

R&D spillovers and the case for industrial policy in an open economy

In this paper we consider the case for subsidies towards firmswhich generate R&D spillovers in open economies. We showthat in the presence of strategic behaviour by firms many expectedresults are overturned. Local R&D spillovers to other domesticfirms may justify an R&D tax rather than a subsidy; R&Dcooperation by local firms over-internalises the externalityand also justifies an R&D tax; and international spilloverswhich benefit foreign firms may justify a subsidy, even thoughthe government cares only about the profits of home firms.     

WATER BANKING AND RESTORATION OF ENDANGERED SPECIES HABITAT: AN APPLICATION TO THE SNAKE RIVER

Most river basins have experienced development of water projects to promote flood control, recreation, and hydropower and agricultural production. Though the projects helped establish stable economies, there have been adverse impacts to the natural environment and wildlife that reside in these river basins. One of the key policy tools for habitat restoration is management of instream flows. Alternative water banking policies for restoring habitat are compared using a spatial optimization model to identify which policies work best to augment instream flows for habitat restoration. Results indicate that policy goals dictate what type of water bank is preferred.     

Case study—Embodied virtual agents: An analysis on reasons for failure

Despite very optimistic academic and professional literatures, embodied virtual agents (EVA) on commercial websites do not seem to keep all their promises. An update in December 2009 of a benchmark led by OrangeLab in 2007 on embodied agents displayed on French websites reveals that more than 60% of them have actually disappeared. This case study deals with understanding the disappearance of embodied virtual agents thanks to a literature review, a benchmark of 80 agents on French commercial websites and an analysis of experts' in-depth-interviews. This work identifies a series of common errors in the agents design – namely, appearance inadequacy and lack of intelligence and autonomy – that creates a gap between consumers' expectations and agents' performance explaining agents' lack of success. As a conclusion, this case study gives practitioners actionable advices to design future agents by highlighting the characteristics of the ideal virtual sales agent (VSA).     

The natural rate of interest and the output gap in the euro area: a joint estimation

The notion of a natural real rate of interest, due to Wicksell (Interest and prices. Macmillan, London Translation of 1898 edition, 1936), is widely used in current central bank research. The idea is that there exists a level at which the real interest rate would be compatible with output at its potential level and stationary inflation. Such a concept is of primary concern for monetary policy because it provides a benchmark for the monetary policy stance. This paper applies the method suggested by Laubach and Williams (Rev Econ Stat 85(4):1063–1070, 2003) to jointly estimate the natural real interest rate and the output gap in the euro area using data from 1960 onwards. Our results suggest that the natural real rate of interest has declined gradually over the past 40 years. They also indicate that monetary policy in the euro area was on average stimulative during the 1960s and the 1970s, while it contributed to dampen the output gap and inflation in the 1980s and 1990s. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the institutions to which they are affiliated. We are grateful to Siem Jan Koopman for very helpful suggestions and comments. We also thank P. Cour-Thimann, V. Curdia, F. Drudi, S. McCaw, D. Rodriguez-Palenzuela, R. Pilegaard, H. Pill, L. Stracca, T. Laubach, J. C. Williams and the participants of an ECB workshop on natural interest rates.     

A new estimate of transaction costs

Transaction costs are important for a host of empirical analysesfrom market efficiency to international market research. Buttransaction costs estimates are not always available, or whereavailable, are cumbersome to use and expensive to purchase.We present a model that requires only the time series of dailysecurity returns to endogenously estimate the effective transactioncosts for any firm, exchange, or time period. The feature ofthe data that allows for the estimation of transaction costsis the incidence of zero returns. Incorporating zero returnsin the return-generating process, the model provides continuousestimates of average round-trip transaction costs from 1963to 1990 that are 1.2% and 10.3% for large and small decile firms,respectively. These estimates are highly correlated (85%), withthe most commonly used transaction cost estimators.     

Intertemporal substitution in consumption, labor supply elasticity and sunspot fluctuations in continuous-time models

The aim of this paper is to discuss the roles of the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption and the elasticity of the labor supply on the local determinacy properties of the steady state in a two-sector economy with constant elasticity of substitution technologies and sector-specific externalities. Our main results provide necessary and sufficient conditions for local indeterminacy. First, we show that the consumption good sector needs to be capital intensive at the private level and labor intensive at the social level. Second, we prove that under this capital intensity configuration, the existence of sunspot fluctuations is obtained if and only if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption is large enough but the elasticity of the labor supply is low enough. In particular, we will show on the one hand that when the labor supply is infinitely elastic, the steady state is always saddle-point stable, and on the other hand that when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption is infinite, labor does not have any influence on the local stability properties of the equilibrium path.     

Option pricing under fast‐varying long‐memory stochastic volatility

Recent empirical studies suggest that the volatility of an underlying price process may have correlations that decay slowly under certain market conditions. In this paper, the volatility is modeled as a stationary process with long‐range correlation properties in order to capture such a situation, and we consider European option pricing. This means that the volatility process is neither a Markov process nor a martingale. However, by exploiting the fact that the price process is still a semimartingale and accordingly using the martingale method, we can obtain an analytical expression for the option price in the regime where the volatility process is fast mean reverting. The volatility process is modeled as a smooth and bounded function of a fractional Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. We give the expression for the implied volatility, which has a fractional term structure.