A Cross‐national Comparison of R&D Expenditure Decisions: Tax Incentives and Financial Constraints*

We provide evidence on the impact of tax incentives and financial constraints on corporate R&D expenditure decisions. We contribute to extant research by comparing R&D expenditures in the United States and Canada, thereby exploiting the differences in the two countries' R&D tax credit mechanisms and generally accepted accounting principles. The two tax incentive mechanism designs are consistent with differing views of the degree of financial constraints faced by firms in these economies. Our sample also allows us to explore the effects of capitalizing R&D on Canadian firms. Employing a matched design, we document relations between tax credit incentives and R&D spending consistent with both Canadian and U.S. public companies responding as though they are not financially constrained. We estimate that the Canadian credit system induces, on average, $1.30 of additional R&D spending per dollar of taxes forgone while the U.S. system induces, on average, $2.96 of additional spending. We also find that firms that capitalize R&D costs in Canada spend, on average, 18 percent more on R&D. Collectively, this evidence is important to the ongoing debates in both countries concerning the appropriate design of incentives for R&D and is consistent with the assumptions found in the U.S. tax credit system, but not those found in the Canadian system.     

“开”奥运品质先河 “启”商用PC新篇

在2008北京奥运会倒计时两周年的日子里,联想集团在北京隆重发布其商用台式新品——新开天、新启天台式电脑。此次发布的联想新开天、新启天系列商用台式电脑由全球三大研发中心通力合作、数百名工程师历时12个月,经过160多项严格测试精心打造而成,这为新开     

联想扬天：商务新运动 互联一点通

近年来,中小企业蓬勃发展,以中小企业用户为代表的新一代信息化需求大军对PC的应用需求也越发明确。在易用高效、功能应用成为大势所趋后,商用PC迎来了全新的商务办公时代。新扬天是全球首款可向用户提供全面先进的蓝牙     

THE EFFECTS OF VERTICAL MARKETS ON TRADE POLICY REFORM

Typically, analysis of trade liberalization ignores the impactthat intermediate stages in the production and distributionsystem may have on the pass-through of changes in tariffs tofinal goods' prices. Using a model of a multi-stage system,this paper shows that both the number of vertical stages andthe degree of imperfect competition at any specific stage canaffect the degree of tariff pass-through. Simulation of themodel with respect to recent changes in the European Union bananaregime suggests that ignoring vertical market structure is likelyto over-estimate the benefits to consumers of trade liberalization.     

Limit Theorems for Estimating the Parameters of Differentiated Product Demand Systems

We provide an asymptotic distribution theory for a class of generalized method of moments estimators that arise in the study of differentiated product markets when the number of observations is associated with the number of products within a given market. We allow for three sources of error: sampling error in estimating market shares, simulation error in approximating the shares predicted by the model, and the underlying model error. It is shown that the estimators are CAN provided the size of the consumer sample and the number of simulation draws grow at a large enough rate relative to the number of products. We consider the implications of the results for the Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) random coefficient logit model and the pure characteristics model analysed in Berry and Pakes (2002) . The required rates differ for these two frequently used demand models. A small Monte Carlo study shows that the differences in asymptotic properties of the two models are reflected, in quite a striking way, in the models' small sample properties. Moreover the limit distributions provide a good approximation to the actual Monte Carlo distribution of the parameter estimates. The results have important implications for the computational burden of the two models.