Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Research, Industrial – Econometric models'

In this thesis, I apply the sophisticated tools made available by the econometrics of panel data and treatment models to a range of different issues. In the first Chapter, an ECM model is used to test on the existence of financing constraints in firms’ investment and R&D, taken a proxy for the efficiency of market institutions and governance rules in different countries. In the second chapter we test an agency model linking pay-performance contracts of CEOS to the financial situation of a firm by using a UK panel data. In the third chapter I use a sophisticated treatment model to evaluate the effectiveness of Italian public subsidies to R&D. Finally, in the fourth chapter I try to evaluate the efficiency of Italian regional systems of public healthcare by controlling for socio-economic factors and quality of healthcare in a composite model using panel data estimation and efficient frontier techniques.

The first Chapter analyzes the investment behavior of a sample of R&D intensive firms which are quoted on the stock market from USA, UK and Japan for the period 1990-1998. By using an error correction model we test the elasticity of investment and R&D to cash flow in these countries to see by which measure different market institutions and corporate governance rules affects the cost of external financing. Contrary to previous studies, we find significant differences in the sensitivity to cash flow of the two types of investment, with R&D expenditure being much less sensitive than ordinary investment. This is not surprising given the more long-term nature of R&D expenditures. For what concerns the comparison between the different systems/countries, the USA stock markets confirms as the most efficient market providing outside financing at a much lower cost compared to other markets, especially for young, smaller firms.

The second Chapter is a joint work with Biagio Speciale. It uses the data on a panel of quoted UK firms over the period 1995–2002 to study the effects of financial leverage on managerial compensation. The change in the investors’ expectations that caused the recent collapse of the stock market tech bubble is a perfect example of natural experiment that has been used as a source of plausibly exogenous variation in the firm’s debt. The estimates show that pay-for-performance sensitivity is increasing in financial leverage, with the exception of the 10% most levered firms, giving rise at the end to a non-linear (inverted U-shape) relationship between the two variables. The chapter includes also a theoretical model accounting for this relationship where an higher leverage increases both the expected returns and the expected variance of investment returns: the first effect (determining increased pay-performance sensitivity) prevails for low leverage values and the second effect (determining decreased pay-performance sensitivity) prevails for high leverage values.

The third Chapter undertakes an empirical estimation of the additionality of public funding on both the propensity to initiate R&D activity and the intensity of R&D spending of Italian enterprises for the period 1998-2000, using data from the Third Community Innovation Survey and from firms' financial accounts. The chosen methodology (Endogenous Switching Type II-Tobit) takes into account the possibility that decisions about both starting an R&D activity (sample selection effect) and applying for/obtaining public funding (essential heterogeneity) are influenced by private knowledge of enterprises' idiosyncratic propensities in R&D spending. The present analysis shows that both these effects are indeed important and that they contribute to explain most of the additionality found with less sophisticated models.

The fourth Chapter investigates the underlying causes of variability of public health expenditure per capita (SSPC henceforth) between Italian regions. A fixed-effect panel data estimate on the SSPC (for the period 1997-2006) is used in the first part of the paper to account for regional differences in terms of physical, demographic, socio-economic characteristics and in terms of other variables that affect demand and supply of health services. In the second part, we take the ‘adjusted’ SSPC and proceed to estimate an "efficient production function" of the quality of health services through Data Envelopment Analysis. This procedure allows us to separate the share of expenditure used for the improvement of the quality from the one that can be traced only to an inefficient use of financial resources. A comparison of regional SSPC after factoring out the socio-economic factors and the quality of healthcare shows that big differences still remain and are even exacerbated, signalling big pockets of inefficiency and correspondingly a huge potential for cost savings. Finally, a preliminary analysis shows a positive correlation between the efficiency of regional public spending in healthcare and the level of social capital.
Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Linking education, science and technology with national development is a subject of increasing concern in many developing countries. In this dissertation, we have studied empirically the contribution, or lack of it, which public investment in education, science and technology has made to the attainment of development objectives in Cameroon since 1960. Using a small computable macroeconometric model of Cameroon incorporating some major relevant quantitative aspects of the knowledge sector, we have investigated the effects on that sector and on the overall economic system of increased education- and research-service resources. We have also analyzed some of the major qualitative factors that are important in this sector.
Our results suggest that, given existing patterns of education, science and technology in Cameroon, the contribution of public investment in this sector may be small compared to the potential contribution suggested in the literature. The implications of these results are examined for policy-making and planning at the national level.

Mathematical and stochastic computer models were built to simulate concurrent engineering processes (CE) in order to study how different process mechanisms contribute to new product development (NPD) performance. Micro-models of various phenomena which occur in concurrent engineering processes, such as functional participation, overlapping, decision-making, rework, and learning, were included, and their effects on the overall NPD process were related to process span time and effort. The study focused on determining under what conditions CE processes are more favorable than sequential processes, in terms of expected payoff, span time, and effort, as dependent variables of functional participation and overlapping, and the corresponding trade-offs between more upfront effort versus span time reduction.

"January 2002" Includes bibliographical references: (p. 31-34). The primary purpose of this study is to develop a framework for identifying the primary drivers of the costs of being customer responsive. The authors' aim is to develop an understanding of the causal drivers of the costs of responsiveness as these costs are considered to be an important input to strategic and tactical decisions. In developing this framework, the paper links the characteristics of responsive manufacturing from the operations management literature with the insights from studies in the accounting literature relating to the drivers of cost. The paper attempts to model the cost impact when a firm responds to ad hoc demands involving the product customization, variation in product mix, or changes to delivery schedules. The costs emerge as a function of the type of responsiveness and the resource capacity management strategy implemented by the firm. The magnitude and dynamics of market demands and firm response, as well as the inherent flexibility of the firm's resources are seen as influencing the magnitude of the costs of responsiveness. disper

Office space oversupply cost Australia billions of dollars during the 1990-92 recession. Australia, the United States, Japan, the U.K., South Africa, China, Thailand, and many other countries have suffered office oversupply cycles. Illiquid untenanted office buildings impair investors capital and cash flows, with adverse effects on macroeconomics, financial institutions, and individuals. This study aims to develop improved methods for medium term forecasting of office market adjustments to inform individual project development decisions and thereby to mitigate office oversupply cycles. Methods combine qualitative research, econometric estimation, system dynamics simulation, and institutional economics. This research operationalises a problem solving research paradigm concept advocated by Ken Lusht. The research is also indebted to the late James Graaskamp, who was successful in linking industry and academic research through time and space specific feasibility studies to inform individual property development decisions. Qualitative research and literature provided a list of contributing causes of office oversupply including random shocks, faulty forecasting methods, fee driven deals, prisoners dilemma game, system dynamics (lags and adjustment times), land use regulation, and capital market issues. Rather than choosing among these, they are all considered to be causal to varying degrees. Moreover, there is synergy between combinations of these market imperfections. Office markets are complex evolving human designed systems (not time invariant) so each cycle has unique historical features. Data on Australian office markets were used to estimate office rent adjustment equations. Simulation models in spreadsheet and system dynamics software then integrate additional information with the statistical results to produce demand, supply, and rent forecasts. Results include models for rent forecasting and models for analysis related to policy and system redesign. The dissertation ends with two chapters on institutional reforms whereby better information might find application to improve market efficiency.Keywords. Office rents, rent adjustment, office market modelling, forecasting, system dynamics.

This thesis is a theoretical study of relationships between patent races and market structure. The outcome of a patent race can be an important determinant of market structure. For example, whether or not a new firm enters a market may depend upon its winning a patent race against an incumbent firm already in that market. Moreover, market structure can be a major influence upon competition in a patent race. In the example, the asymmetry between incumbent and potential entrant has an effect upon their respective incentives in the patent race. Chapter I discusses models of R and D with uncertainty. We show that, as the degree of correlation between the uncertainties facing rival firms increases, R and D efforts increase under some, but not all, conditions, and the number of active competitors falls. Chapter II discusses the approach of representing patent races as bidding games. We examine a model in which several incumbent firms compete with a number of potential entrants in a patent race, and ask whether the incumbents have an incentive to form a joint venture to deter entry. They do so if and only if the patent does not offer a major cost improvement. In Chapter III we examine the strategic interactions between competitors during the course of a race, in an attempt to clarify (for different types of race) the idea that a race degenerates when one player becomes 'far enough ahead' of his rivals, in a sense made precise. In Chapter IV we examine the evolution of market structure in a duopoly model when there is a sequence of patent races. The nature of competition in the product market is shown to determine whether one firm becomes increasingly dominant as industry leader, or whether there is 'action - reaction' between firms.

The kanban system is the most popular technique for implementing the Just-In-Time philosophy. In this dissertation we develop mathematical models for the deterministic, capacitated, single kanban system. Three different production structures are studied. The models are used to analyze the system, understand the need and behavior of kanbans, and compute good solutions for the number of kanbans to allocate for each part. The first model applies to the single-stage, single-item system. Optimal solutions for the number of kanbans for this system are developed. The second and third models are built for the multi-stage, single-item system and the single-stage, multi-item system respectively. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the feasibility of a set of kanbans are developed for the last two models. The conditions are used to develop heuristic and optimal solution procedures. The heuristic procedures are tested over randomly generated problems and are shown to perform very well compared to the optimal solution procedures.

This dissertation presents a new multiple objective optimization algorithm that is capable of solving for the entire Pareto set in one single optimization run. The multi-objective complex evolution (MOCOM-UA) procedure is based on the following three concepts: (1) population, (2) rank-based selection, and (3) competitive evolution. In the MOCOM-UA algorithm, a population of candidate solutions is evolved in the feasible space to search for the Pareto set. Ranking of the population is accomplished through Pareto Ranking, where all points are successively placed on different Pareto fronts. Competitive evolution consists of selecting subsets of points (including all worst points in the population) based on their ranks and moving the worst points toward the Pareto set using the newly developed multi-objective simplex (MOSIM) procedure. Test analysis on the MOCOM-UA algorithm is accomplished on mathematical problems of increasing complexity and based on a bi-criterion measure of performance. The two performance criteria used are (1) efficiency, as measured by the ability of the algorithm to converge quickly and (2) effectiveness, as measured by the ability of the algorithm to locate the Pareto set. Comparison of the MOCOM-UA algorithm against three multi-objective genetic algorithms (MOGAs) favors the former. In a realistic application, the MOCOM-UA algorithm is used to calibrate the Soil Moisture Accounting model of the National Weather Service River Forecasting Systems (NWSRFS-SMA). Multi-objective calibration of this model is accomplished using two bi-criterion objective functions, namely the Daily Root Mean Square-Heteroscedastic Maximum Likelihood Estimator (DRMS, HMLE) and rising limb-falling limb (RISE, FALL) objective functions. These two multi-objective calibrations provide some interesting insights into the influence of different objectives in the location of final parameter values as well as limitations in the structure of the NWSRFS-SMA model.

Stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) and extensions are a popular method for evaluating a wide variety of systems. In most cases, the interesting measures regarding the system's characteristics can be defined at the net level by means of reward variables. Depending on the measures, these net-level reward models are solved either by first generating a state-level reward model or by directly generating paths from the net-level description. In this thesis, we propose algorithms for the generation of state-level reward models as well as for directly obtaining solutions from net-level reward models when the net-level reward models are specified as stochastic activity networks (SANs) with "step-based reward structure." Moreover, we propose algorithms for computing the expected value and the probability distribution function of a reward variable at specified time instants, and for computing the probability distribution function of reward accumulated during a finite interval. The interval may correspond to the mission period in a mission-critical system, the time between scheduled maintenances, or a warranty period; whereas the time instants may be critical instances during these intervals. The proposed algorithms avoid the construction of state-level representations and the memory growth problems experienced when applying previous approaches to large models. Furthermore, we study the effect of workload on the availability and response time of voting algorithms. Voting algorithms are a popular way to provide data consistency in replicated data systems. Many models have been made to study the degree to which replication increases the availability of data, and some have been made to study the cost incurred in maintaining consistency. However, little work has been done to evaluate the time it takes to serve request, accounting for server and network failures, or to determine the effect of workload on these measures. In this thesis, we use stochastic activity networks (SANs) to study the effect of work load on availability and mean response time of two variant models of a replicated file system to maintain data consistency, one using a static voting algorithm, the other using a dynamic voting algorithm.

Office space oversupply cost Australia billions of dollars during the 1990-92 recession. Australia, the United States, Japan, the U.K., South Africa, China, Thailand, and many other countries have suffered office oversupply cycles. Illiquid untenanted office buildings impair investors capital and cash flows, with adverse effects on macroeconomics, financial institutions, and individuals. This study aims to develop improved methods for medium term forecasting of office market adjustments to inform individual project development decisions and thereby to mitigate office oversupply cycles. Methods combine qualitative research, econometric estimation, system dynamics simulation, and institutional economics. This research operationalises a problem solving research paradigm concept advocated by Ken Lusht. The research is also indebted to the late James Graaskamp, who was successful in linking industry and academic research through time and space specific feasibility studies to inform individual property development decisions. Qualitative research and literature provided a list of contributing causes of office oversupply including random shocks, faulty forecasting methods, fee driven deals, prisoners dilemma game, system dynamics (lags and adjustment times), land use regulation, and capital market issues. Rather than choosing among these, they are all considered to be causal to varying degrees. Moreover, there is synergy between combinations of these market imperfections. Office markets are complex evolving human designed systems (not time invariant) so each cycle has unique historical features. Data on Australian office markets were used to estimate office rent adjustment equations. Simulation models in spreadsheet and system dynamics software then integrate additional information with the statistical results to produce demand, supply, and rent forecasts. Results include ++
models for rent forecasting and models for analysis related to policy and system redesign. The dissertation ends with two chapters on institutional reforms whereby better information might find application to improve market efficiency.Keywords. Office rents, rent adjustment, office market modelling, forecasting, system dynamics.

Este trabalho teve por objetivo determinar a influência das características dos países e indústrias no comércio intra-industrial brasileiro de produtos manufaturados, considerando fluxos de quantidades comercializadas ao ano, para o período de 2002 a 2006, através de estimativas de uma equação gravitacional adaptada à análise dessa forma de comércio. As variáveis explicativas são relacionadas ao tamanho de mercado, representado pela proxy LPIBij, diferenças entre as rendas per capita dos países, representadas pela proxy LdPIBpcij, e tarifas aduaneiras aplicadas pelos países importadores, LTarifas. Tais variáveis foram utilizadas para analisar o comércio intraindustrial e seus componentes horizontal e vertical. A fundamentação teórica para proceder à segmentação do comércio intra-industrial brasileiro, segundo tais características, foi derivada de trabalhos conduzidos por Falvey (1981), Helpman e Krugman, (1985) e Greenaway, et al. (1995). A mensuração do Índice de Grubel-Lloyd e a posterior separação dos componentes do CII utilizando valor unitário indicam uma composição do comércio intra-industrial brasileiro com forte predomínio do componente CII Vertical Inferior.Os resultados da estimação das equações gravitacionais, com a utilização dos dados em painel e a utilização de Poisson Pseudo-Maximum-Likelihood comprovou ser a mais adequada para a estimativa econométrica.Para o comércio intraindustrial total, os resultados indicaram que o tamanho de mercado, tem um efeito positivo sobre o fluxo de exportação dos produtos brasileiros com comércio intraindustrial (0,517), porém, as diferenças entre as rendas per capita dos países (-0,183) e tarifas aduaneiras dos países importadores (-0,356), são negativamente relacionados. Os resultados para o comércio intra-industrial vertical e horizontal apresentam os mesmos sinais que o CII total, com alteração na magnitude.
This study aimed to determine the influence of characteristics for countries and industries in intra-industry trade (IIT) of Brazilian manufactured products, considering the annual trade flows for the period 2002 to 2006 and using a gravity equation adapted to analysis this form of trade . The explanatory variables are related to market size, represented by proxy LPIBij, differences between per capita incomes of countries represented by proxy LdPIBpcij, and tariffs imposed by importing countries, represented by proxy LTarifas. These variables were used to analyze the intra-industry trade and its horizontal and vertical components. The theoretical basis to make the segmentation of intra-industry in Brazil, according to such characteristics, was derived from studies conducted by Falvey (1981), Helpman and Krugman (1985) and Greenaway et al.(1995). The measurement of the Grubel-Lloyd index and the subsequent separation of components from IIT using unit value indicates that the brazilian intra-industry trade has a strong predominance of IIT Vertical Low quality. The results of the estimation of the gravitational equations with the use of panel data and the use of Poisson Pseudo- Maximum-Likelihood proved to be the most suitable for econometric estimation. The results for intra-industry total indicated that the market size, has a positive effect on the flow of exports of Brazilian products with intra-industry trade (0,517), however, the differences between per capita incomes (-0,183) of countries and tariffs in importing countries (-0,356) have a negative relation. The results for vertical and horizontal intraindustry trade have the same signals than intra-industry total but they differ in magnitude.

Accurate estimation of alcohol price elasticity is important for policy analysis – e.g.., determining optimal taxes and projecting revenues generated from proposed tax changes. Several approaches to specifying and estimating the price elasticity of demand for alcohol can be found in the literature. There are two keys to policy-relevant specification and estimation of alcohol price elasticity. First, the underlying demand model should take account of alcohol consumption decisions at the extensive margin – i.e., individuals’ decisions to drink or not – because the price of alcohol may impact the drinking initiation decision and one’s decision to drink is likely to be structurally different from how much they drink if they decide to do so (the intensive margin). Secondly, the modeling of alcohol demand elasticity should yield both theoretical and empirical results that are causally interpretable. The elasticity estimates obtained from the existing two-part model takes into account the extensive margin, but are not causally interpretable.

The elasticity estimates obtained using aggregate-level models, however, are causally interpretable, but do not explicitly take into account the extensive margin. There currently exists no specification and estimation method for alcohol price elasticity that both accommodates the extensive margin and is causally interpretable. I explore additional sources of bias in the extant approaches to elasticity specification and estimation: 1) the use of logged (vs. nominal) alcohol prices; and 2) implementation of unnecessarily restrictive assumptions underlying the conventional two-part model. I propose a new approach to elasticity specification and estimation that covers the two key requirements for policy relevance and remedies all such biases. I find evidence of substantial divergence between the new and extant methods using both simulated and the real data. Such differences are profound when placed in the context of alcohol tax revenue generation.

This study examines the importance of public research and development (R&D) expenditures and innovations (prices) to U S agricultural productivity employing panel vector error correction econometric technique Specifically, time-series and panel unit root tests, panel cointegration procedures, panel causality tests, and vector error correction model are used in the analysis. Empirical application to U S state-level data for 1960-2004 suggests positive and statistically significant influence of both supply-side drivers, in the form of public R&D expenditures, and demand-side drivers, in the form of innovations (prices), on total factor productivity growth.

O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar o Modelo Vetorial Autorregressivo (VAR) e uma das suas variações, o Modelo Vetorial de Correções de Erros (VEC), segundo uma abordagem Bayesiana, considerando componentes regionais, que serão inseridos nos modelos apresentados através de informações a priori que levam em consideração a localização dos dados. Para formar tais informações a priori são utilizados conceitos referentes à econometria espacial, como por exemplo, as relações de contigüidade e as implicações que estas trazem. Como exemplo ilustrativo, o modelo em questão será aplicado a um conjunto de dados regionais, coletados por estados brasileiros. Este conjunto de dados consiste em observações da variável produção industrial para oito estados, no período de janeiro de 1991 a setembro de 2006. Em função da escolha do modelo adequado, a questão central foi descobrir em que medida a incorporação destas informações a priori no modelo VEC Bayesiano é coerente quando estimamos modelos que consideram informações localizacionais.
The main goal of this work is to present the Vector Autoregressive Model (VAR) and one of its variations, the Vector Error Correction Model (VEC), according to a Bayesian variant, considering regional components that will be inserted in the models presented through prior information, which takes in consideration the data localization. To form such prior information, spatial econometrics is used, as for example the contiguity relations and the implications that these bring to the modeling. As illustrative example, the model in question will be applied to a regional data set, collected for Brazilian states. This data set consists of industrial production for eight states, in the period between January 1991 and September 2006. The central question is to uncover whether the incorporation of these prior informations in the Bayesian VEC Model is coherent when we use models that consider contiguity information.

This study argues that governments with sustained GDP growth, open markets, low country risk, high levels and low standard deviation of government performance, and few or no occurrences of war, will see larger levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) over time. Scholarship on the determinants of FDI variously argues the influence of GDP growth, the openness of a country's economy, a government's level of political capacity, the level of country risk, and the negative effects of inter-, intra- and extrastate conflict. These studies on the various effects on FDI, while providing insightful and substantial statistical results, fail to capture the simultaneous effects of macroeconomic, government performance, country risk, and war variables. The present study attempts to resolve this gap in the literature on FDI by proposing a multi-dimensional model of the combined effects of un-weighted macroeconomic, political, country risk, and war variables on FDI flows over time. The empirical results confirm the expected multi-dimensional nature of FDI flows over time and provide insight into the macroeconomic and political effects on regional and country-level yearly flows of FDI, as well as yielding some unexpected and counter-intuitive results of the role war plays on FDI flows over time.

The active use of macroeconomic policies to smooth economic fluctuations and, as a

consequence, the stance that policymakers should adopt over the business cycle, remain

controversial issues in the economic literature.

In the light of the dramatic experience of the early 1930s’ Great Depression, Keynes (1936)

argued that the market mechanism could not be relied upon to spontaneously recover from

a slump, and advocated counter-cyclical public spending and monetary policy to stimulate

demand. Albeit the Keynesian doctrine had largely influenced policymaking during

the two decades following World War II, it began to be seriously challenged in several

directions since the start of the 1970s. The introduction of rational expectations within

macroeconomic models implied that aggregate demand management could not stabilize

the economy’s responses to shocks (see in particular Sargent and Wallace (1975)). According

to this view, in fact, rational agents foresee the effects of the implemented policies, and

wage and price expectations are revised upwards accordingly. Therefore, real wages and

money balances remain constant and so does output. Within such a conceptual framework,

only unexpected policy interventions would have some short-run effects upon the economy.

The "real business cycle (RBC) theory", pioneered by Kydland and Prescott (1982), offered

an alternative explanation on the nature of fluctuations in economic activity, viewed

as reflecting the efficient responses of optimizing agents to exogenous sources of fluctuations, outside the direct control of policymakers. The normative implication was that

there should be no role for economic policy activism: fiscal and monetary policy should be

acyclical. The latest generation of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium

(DSGE) models builds on rigorous foundations in intertemporal optimizing behavior by

consumers and firms inherited from the RBC literature, but incorporates some frictions

in the adjustment of nominal and real quantities in response to macroeconomic shocks

(see Woodford (2003)). In such a framework, not only policy "surprises" may have an

impact on the economic activity, but also the way policymakers "systematically" respond

to exogenous sources of fluctuation plays a fundamental role in affecting the economic

activity, thereby rekindling interest in the use of counter-cyclical stabilization policies to

fine tune the business cycle.

Yet, despite impressive advances in the economic theory and econometric techniques, there are no definitive answers on the systematic stance policymakers should follow, and on the

effects of macroeconomic policies upon the economy. Against this background, the present thesis attempts to inspect the interrelations between macroeconomic policies and the economic activity from novel angles. Three contributions

are proposed.

In the first Chapter, I show that relying on the information actually available to policymakers when budgetary decisions are taken is of fundamental importance for the assessment of the cyclical stance of governments. In the second, I explore whether the effectiveness of fiscal shocks in spurring the economic activity has declined since the beginning of the 1970s. In the third, the impact of systematic monetary policies over U.S. industrial sectors is investigated. In the existing literature, empirical assessments of the historical stance of policymakers over the economic cycle have been mainly drawn from the estimation of "reduced-form" policy reaction functions (see in particular Taylor (1993) and Galì and Perotti (2003)). Such rules typically relate a policy instrument (a reference short-term interest rate or an indicator of discretionary fiscal policy) to a set of explanatory variables (notably inflation, the output gap and the debt-GDP ratio, as long as fiscal policy is concerned). Although these policy rules can be seen as simple approximations of what derived from an explicit optimization problem solved by social planners (see Kollmann (2007)), they received considerable attention since they proved to track the behavior of central banks and fiscal

policymakers relatively well. Typically, revised data, i.e. observations available to the

econometrician when the study is carried out, are used in the estimation of such policy

reaction functions. However, data available in "real-time" to policymakers may end up

to be remarkably different from what it is observed ex-post. Orphanides (2001), in an

innovative and thought-provoking paper on the U.S. monetary policy, challenged the way

policy evaluation was conducted that far by showing that unrealistic assumptions about

the timeliness of data availability may yield misleading descriptions of historical policy.

In the spirit of Orphanides (2001), in the first Chapter of this thesis I reconsider how

the intentional cyclical stance of fiscal authorities should be assessed. Importantly, in

the framework of fiscal policy rules, not only variables such as potential output and the

output gap are subject to measurement errors, but also the main discretionary "operating

instrument" in the hands of governments: the structural budget balance, i.e. the headline

government balance net of the effects due to automatic stabilizers. In fact, the actual

realization of planned fiscal measures may depend on several factors (such as the growth

rate of GDP, the implementation lags that often follow the adoption of many policy

measures, and others more) outside the direct and full control of fiscal authorities. Hence,

there might be sizeable differences between discretionary fiscal measures as planned in the

past and what it is observed ex-post. To be noted, this does not apply to monetary policy

since central bankers can control their operating interest rates with great accuracy.

When the historical behavior of fiscal authorities is analyzed from a real-time perspective, it emerges that the intentional stance has been counter-cyclical, especially during expansions, in the main OECD countries throughout the last thirteen years. This is at

odds with findings based on revised data, generally pointing to pro-cyclicality (see for example Gavin and Perotti (1997)). It is shown that empirical correlations among revision

errors and other second-order moments allow to predict the size and the sign of the bias

incurred in estimating the intentional stance of the policy when revised data are (mistakenly)

used. It addition, formal tests, based on a refinement of Hansen (1999), do not reject

the hypothesis that the intentional reaction of fiscal policy to the cycle is characterized by

two regimes: one counter-cyclical, when output is above its potential level, and the other

acyclical, in the opposite case. On the contrary, the use of revised data does not allow to identify any threshold effect.

The second and third Chapters of this thesis are devoted to the exploration of the impact

of fiscal and monetary policies upon the economy.

Over the last years, two approaches have been mainly followed by practitioners for the

estimation of the effects of macroeconomic policies on the real activity. On the one hand,

calibrated and estimated DSGE models allow to trace out the economy’s responses to

policy disturbances within an analytical framework derived from solid microeconomic

foundations. On the other, vector autoregressive (VAR) models continue to be largely

used since they have proved to fit macro data particularly well, albeit they cannot fully

serve to inspect structural interrelations among economic variables.

Yet, the typical DSGE and VAR models are designed to handle a limited number of variables

and are not suitable to address economic questions potentially involving a large

amount of information. In a DSGE framework, in fact, identifying aggregate shocks and

their propagation mechanism under a plausible set of theoretical restrictions becomes a

thorny issue when many variables are considered. As for VARs, estimation problems may

arise when models are specified in a large number of indicators (although latest contributions suggest that large-scale Bayesian VARs perform surprisingly well in forecasting.

See in particular Banbura, Giannone and Reichlin (2007)). As a consequence, the growing

popularity of factor models as effective econometric tools allowing to summarize in

a parsimonious and flexible manner large amounts of information may be explained not

only by their usefulness in deriving business cycle indicators and forecasting (see for example

Reichlin (2002) and D’Agostino and Giannone (2006)), but also, due to recent

developments, by their ability in evaluating the response of economic systems to identified

structural shocks (see Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone, Lippi

and Reichlin (2007)). Parallelly, some attempts have been made to combine the rigor of

DSGE models and the tractability of VAR ones, with the advantages of factor analysis

(see Boivin and Giannoni (2006) and Bernanke, Boivin and Eliasz (2005)).

The second Chapter of this thesis, based on a joint work with Agnès Bénassy-Quéré, presents an original study combining factor and VAR analysis in an encompassing framework,

to investigate how "unexpected" and "unsystematic" variations in taxes and government

spending feed through the economy in the home country and abroad. The domestic

impact of fiscal shocks in Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. and cross-border fiscal spillovers

from Germany to seven European economies is analyzed. In addition, the time evolution of domestic and cross-border tax and spending multipliers is explored. In fact, the way fiscal policy impacts on domestic and foreign economies

depends on several factors, possibly changing over time. In particular, the presence of excess

capacity, accommodating monetary policy, distortionary taxation and liquidity constrained

consumers, plays a prominent role in affecting how fiscal policies stimulate the

economic activity in the home country. The impact on foreign output crucially depends

on the importance of trade links, on real exchange rates and, in a monetary union, on

the sensitiveness of foreign economies to the common interest rate. It is well documented

that the last thirty years have witnessed frequent changes in the economic environment.

For instance, in most OECD countries, the monetary policy stance became less accommodating

in the 1980s compared to the 1970s, and more accommodating again in the

late 1990s and early 2000s. Moreover, financial markets have been heavily deregulated.

Hence, fiscal policy might have lost (or gained) power as a stimulating tool in the hands

of policymakers. Importantly, the issue of cross-border transmission of fiscal policy decisions is of the utmost relevance in the framework of the European Monetary Union and this explains why the debate on fiscal policy coordination has received so much attention since the adoption

of the single currency (see Ahearne, Sapir and Véron (2006) and European Commission

(2006)). It is found that over the period 1971 to 2004 tax shocks have generally been more effective in spurring domestic output than government spending shocks. Interestingly, the inclusion of common factors representing global economic phenomena yields to smaller multipliers

reconciling, at least for the U.K. the evidence from large-scale macroeconomic models,

generally finding feeble multipliers (see e.g. European Commission’s QUEST model), with

the one from a prototypical structural VAR pointing to stronger effects of fiscal policy.

When the estimation is performed recursively over samples of seventeen years of data, it

emerges that GDP multipliers have dropped drastically from early 1990s on, especially

in Germany (tax shocks) and in the U.S. (both tax and government spending shocks).

Moreover, the conduct of fiscal policy seems to have become less erratic, as documented

by a lower variance of fiscal shocks over time, and this might contribute to explain why

business cycles have shown less volatility in the countries under examination.

Expansionary fiscal policies in Germany do not generally have beggar-thy-neighbor effects

on other European countries. In particular, our results suggest that tax multipliers have

been positive but vanishing for neighboring countries (France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria), weak and mostly not significant for more remote ones (the U.K.

and Spain). Cross-border government spending multipliers are found to be monotonically

weak for all the subsamples considered.

Overall these findings suggest that fiscal "surprises", in the form of unexpected reductions in taxation and expansions in government consumption and investment, have become progressively less successful in stimulating the economic activity at the domestic level, indicating that, in the framework of the European Monetary Union, policymakers can only marginally rely on this discretionary instrument as a substitute for national monetary policies.

The objective of the third chapter is to inspect the role of monetary policy in the U.S. business cycle. In particular, the effects of "systematic" monetary policies upon several industrial sectors is investigated. The focus is on the systematic, or endogenous, component of monetary policy (i.e. the one which is related to the economic activity in a stable and predictable way), for three main reasons. First, endogenous monetary policies are likely to have sizeable real effects, if agents’ expectations are not perfectly rational and if there are some nominal and real frictions in a market. Second, as widely documented, the variability of the monetary instrument and of the main macro variables is only marginally explained by monetary "shocks", defined as unexpected and exogenous variations in monetary conditions. Third, monetary shocks can be simply interpreted as measurement errors (see Christiano, Eichenbaum

and Evans (1998)). Hence, the systematic component of monetary policy is likely to have played a fundamental role in affecting business cycle fluctuations. The strategy to isolate the impact of systematic policies relies on a counterfactual experiment, within a (calibrated or estimated) macroeconomic model. As a first step, a macroeconomic shock to which monetary policy is likely to respond should be selected,

and its effects upon the economy simulated. Then, the impact of such shock should be

evaluated under a “policy-inactive” scenario, assuming that the central bank does not respond

to it. Finally, by comparing the responses of the variables of interest under these

two scenarios, some evidence on the sensitivity of the economic system to the endogenous

component of the policy can be drawn (see Bernanke, Gertler and Watson (1997)).

Such kind of exercise is first proposed within a stylized DSGE model, where the analytical

solution of the model can be derived. However, as argued, large-scale multi-sector DSGE

models can be solved only numerically, thus implying that the proposed experiment cannot

be carried out. Moreover, the estimation of DSGE models becomes a thorny issue when many variables are incorporated (see Canova and Sala (2007)). For these arguments, a less “structural”, but more tractable, approach is followed, where a minimal amount of

identifying restrictions is imposed. In particular, a factor model econometric approach

is adopted (see in particular Giannone, Reichlin and Sala (2002) and Forni, Giannone,

Lippi and Reichlin (2007)). In this framework, I develop a technique to perform the counterfactual experiment needed to assess the impact of systematic monetary policies.

It is found that 2 and 3-digit SIC U.S. industries are characterized by very heterogeneous degrees of sensitivity to the endogenous component of the policy. Notably, the industries showing the strongest sensitivities are the ones producing durable goods and metallic

materials. Non-durable good producers, food, textile and lumber producing industries are

the least affected. In addition, it is highlighted that industrial sectors adjusting prices relatively infrequently are the most "vulnerable" ones. In fact, firms in this group are likely to increase quantities, rather than prices, following a shock positively hitting the economy. Finally, it emerges that sectors characterized by a higher recourse to external sources to finance investments, and sectors investing relatively more in new plants and machineries, are the most affected by endogenous monetary actions.
Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Lean distribution networks have been facing an increased exposure to the risk of unpredicted disruptions causing significant economic forfeitures. At the same time, the existing literature contains very few studies that examine the impact of fortification of facilities for improving network reliability. This dissertation presents three related classes of models that support the design of reliable distribution networks. The models extend the uncapacitated P-median and fixed-charge location models by considering heterogeneous facility failure probabilities, supplier backups, and facility fortification within a finite budget. The first class of models considers binary fortification via linear fortification functions. The second class of models extends binary fortification to partial (continuous) reliability improvement with linear fortification. This extension allows a more efficient utilization of limited fortification resources. The third class of models generalizes linear fortification to nonlinear to reflect the effect of diminishing marginal reliability improvement from fortification investment. For each of the models, we develop solution algorithms and demonstrate their computational efficiency. We present a detailed discussion on the novelty of the proposed models. The models are intended to support corporate decisions on the design of robust distribution networks using limited fortification resources.

This PhD thesis provides abundant empirical evidence on the effectiveness of environmental policy instruments alone and as a policy-mix, looking at its effect on green investment and employment. Finally, it also studies the social welfare outcomes of the implementation of the two environmental policy instruments – environmental taxes and public financing. The most direct and obvious conclusion that can be extracted from this thesis is that properly designed policy-instruments are necessary to incentivise firms to invest in green technologies, especially if we want to encourage investment in cleaner production technologies over pollution abating technologies, which is not an easy task to do. I refer to the industrial and energy firms because on one hand, they contribute significantly to air pollution, waste pollution and address resource scarcity, making it even more important for them to invest in technologies that would significantly address the negative externalities. In this regard, this thesis contributes to the literature on causal evidence of environmental policy instruments on firm behaviour, as well as social welfare outcomes arising from different policy scenarios. More specifically, the second chapter of this thesis contributes to the literature on social welfare outcomes arising from the different environmental policy scenarios. In the analysed model we are faced with the asymmetry of decision making. While the regulator favours green investment, which reduces the total pollution level, firms prefer to keep producing using their dirty technology in the symmetric scenarios. The question that arises, therefore, is how such an equilibrium can be induced? It might be the case that with more money being directed at R&D, technologies would become more efficient and cheaper, making it more desirable for firms. From the policy perspective, especially investment in private environment R&D is highly encouraged. In the third chapter of this thesis, I contribute to the literature on drivers of eco-innovations by identifying crucial regulatory factors and firms’ organizational capabilities for encouraging enterprises to invest in green technologies. We observe differences between the drivers of investment in cleaner production and end-of-pipe technologies. In addition, we distinguish between investments with the purpose to reduce air pollution and energy consumption. Firstly, environmental taxation in Spain seems to be rather ineffective at stimulating investment in greener technologies, both for end-of-pipe as well as for cleaner production technologies. We argue that in the Spanish context this might be caused by relatively low rates, environmental taxes might not be doing their task effectively. At the same time, firms react positively to investment subsidies and investment tax incentives. Tax credits seem to be especially successful at financing cleaner production technologies while subsidies are positively related to both EP and CP investments. The implication derived from these findings reveals that direct policies such as subsidies help firms to convert into greener companies, while tax credits lead to reductions in production costs for firms, that pursue a substantial transformation of their production process. Additionally, we can conclude that organization capabilities matter for investment in green technologies. Admittedly, hiring green employees is a strong factor pushing each firm towards green investments, while the relationship between green procedures and certifications is not clear. The fourth chapter of this thesis is aimed at evaluating the effectiveness of environmental taxes in Spain at different levels of taxation, in the absence and in combination with public finance - an equally important market-based instrument addressing the market failure of firms. The evaluation is performed with regards to whether the implementation of such environmental policy instrument in Spain is successful at encouraging adoption of green technologies among manufacturing firms. Our results suggest that environmental taxation is effective at encouraging adoption of both types of green technologies. That being said, once we split our treatment to different categories, we find that low levels of environmental taxation do not induce further investments in process eco-innovations. Therefore, we show that the average treatment effect masks substantial heterogeneity across the taxation level groups. Results also consistently show that increasing the amount of taxation increases also the subsequent adoption of green technologies. In the sample of fully supported environmental tax payers, it seems to emerge that firms that are required to pay around EUR 2,500 per year already exhibit significantly higher investment in green technology than under lower amounts of taxation. Additionally, our findings seem to suggest that even low levels of environmental taxation can be effective at inducing investment in green technology if combined with public financing. However, once again the effect is the largest when environmental taxation is at the medium level. That being said, if the regulator is reluctant to increase the taxation level in fear of hurting firms' competitiveness, even low levels of taxation can be effective in combination with public support. Large levels of environmental though very effective on its own, are not strongly encouraged with combination of public financing. The fifth chapter of this thesis analyses, in turn, a large-scale national tax incentive program in Spain, which started in 1996 and finished in 2015. Due to data availability, I focus on the 2008-2014 time window. The findings seem to suggest that encouragement to eliminate the EI tax incentives from the Spanish Corporate Income Tax and fears that they were not successful enough was unwarranted. While it is true that the EI tax credit favoured pollution abating over energy efficient technologies, it did increase substantially investment – and even in the times of financial crises, when the capital market failure was particularly severe. The EI tax credit was found to have positive indirect effects on both number of green employees and private environmental R\&D, which could have additional positive spill-over effects. With regards to the policy change, which was aimed at disincentivizing financing of pollution abating technologies and encouraging – it was assessed as semi-effective. While it is true that it did discourage investment in end-of-pipe technologies, especially those aimed at air-pollution reduction, we could not observe investment in cleaner production technologies increasing as a result. This could suggest that tax incentives should be more clearly defined, as to avoid (1) technological lock-down in old technologies, (2) encourage technologies that do change the production process and result in smaller usage of natural resources e.g energy consumption. One of the caveats of the studied EI tax credit was the confusion it created not only with respect to eligibility criteria but also the definition of technologies that it aimed to finance. Lastly, it is quite comforting to observe, however, that the tax incentive seemed to have addressed the capital market failure of small firms for the investment in cleaner production technologies. The results from the heterogeneous analysis also point out to the fact that this positive effect exists in stark contrast to the reduction in the investment suffered by the big firms.

The aim of the thesis is to further explore the relationship between economic integration and firm mobility and investment, both from an empirical and a theoretical perspective, with the objective of drawing conclusions on how government policy can be used to strengthen the positive impact of integration on investment, which is crucial in moving and maintaining countries at the forefront of the technology frontier and accelerating economic growth in a world of rapid technical change and high mobility of ideas, goods, services, capital and labor.

The first chapter aims to bring together the literature on economic integration, firm mobility and investment. It contains two sections: one dedicated to the literature on FDI and the second covering the literature on firm entry and exit, economic performance and economic and business regulation.

In the second chapter I examine the relationship between the Single Market and FDI both in an intra-EU context and from outside the EU. The empirical results show that the impact of the Single Market on FDI differs substantially from one country to another. This finding may be due to the functioning of institutions.

The third chapter studies the relationship between the level of external trade protection put into place by a Regional Integration Agreement(RIA)and the option of a firm from outside the RIA block to serve the RIA market through FDI rather than exports. I find that the level of external trade protection put in place by the RIA depends on the RIA country's capacity to benefit from FDI spillovers, the magnitude of set-up costs of building a plant in the RIA and on the amount of external trade protection erected by the country from outside the reigonal block with respect to the RIA.

The fourth chapter studies how the firm entry and exit process is affected by product market reforms and regulations and impact macroeconomic performance. The results show that an increase in deregulation will lead to a rise in firm entry and exit. This in turn will especially affect macroeconomic performance as measured by output growth and labor productivity growth. The analysis done at the sector level shows that results can differ substantially across industries, which implies that deregulation policies should be conducted at the sector level, rather than at the global macroeconomic level.
Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

In the first chapter,a harmonised linked employer-employee dataset is used to study the impact of firm-level agreements on the wage structure in the manufacturing sector in Belgium, Denmark and Spain. To our knowledge, this is one of the first cross-country studies that examines the impact of firm-level bargaining on the wage structure in European countries. We find that firm-level agreements have a positive effect both on wage levels and on wage dispersion in Belgium and Denmark. In Spain, firm also increase wage levels but reduce wage dispersion. Our interpretation is that in Belgium and Denmark, where firm-level bargaining greatly expanded since the 1980s on the initiative of the employers and the governments, firm-level bargaining is mainly used to adapt pay to the specific needs of the firm. In Spain, the structure of collective bargaining has not changed very much since the Franco period where firm agreements were used as a tool for worker mobilisation and for political struggle. Therefore, firm-level bargaining in Spain is still mainly used by trade unions in order to reduce the wage dispersion.

In the second chapter, we analyse the impact of the bargaining level and of the degree of centralisation of wage bargaining on rent-sharing in Belgium. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that considers simultaneously both dimensions of collective bargaining. This is also one of the first papers that looks at the impact of wage bargaining institutions on rent-sharing in European countries. This question is important because if wage bargaining decentralisation increases the link between wages and firm specific profits, it may prevent an efficient allocation of labour across firms, increase wage inequality, lead to smaller employment adjustments, and affect the division of surplus between capital and labour (Bryson et al. 2006). Controlling for the endogeneity of profits, for heterogeneity among workers and firms and for differences in characteristics between bargaining regimes, we find that wages depend substantially more on firm specific profits in decentralised than in centralised industries ,irrespective of the presence of a formal firm collective agreement. In addition, the impact of the presence of a formal firm collective agreement on the wage-profit elasticity depends on the degree of centralisation of the industry. In centralised industries, profits influence wages only when a firm collective agreement is present. This result is not surprising since industry agreements do not take into account firm-specific characteristics. Within decentralised industries, firms share their profits with their workers even if they are not covered by a formal firm collective agreement. This is probably because, in those industries, workers only covered by an industry agreement (i.e. not covered by a formal firm agreement) receive wage supplements that are paid unilaterally by their employer. The fact that those workers also benefit from rent-sharing implies that pay-setting does not need to be collective to generate rent-sharing, which is in line with the Anglo-American literature that shows that rent-sharing is not a particularity of the unionised sector.

In the first two chapters, we have shown that, in Belgium, firm-level bargaining is used by firms to adapt pay to the specific characteristics of the firm, including firm’s profits. In the third and final chapter, it is shown that firm-level bargaining also allows wages to adapt to the local environment that the company may face. This aspect is of particular importance in the debate about a potential regionalisation of wage bargaining in Belgium. This debate is, however, not specific to Belgium. Indeed, the potential failure of national industry agreements to take into account the productivity levels of the least productive regions has been considered as one of the causes of regional unemployment in European countries (Davies and Hallet, 2001; OECD, 2006). Two kinds of solutions are generally proposed to solve this problem. The first, encouraged by the European Commission and the OECD, consists in decentralising wage bargaining toward the firm level (Davies and Hallet, 2001; OECD, 2006). The second solution, the regionalisation of wage bargaining, is frequently mentioned in Belgium or in Italy where regional unemployment differentials are high. In this chapter we show that, in Belgium, regional wage differentials and regional productivity differentials within joint committees are positively correlated. Moreover, this relation is stronger (i) for joint committees where firm-level bargaining is relatively frequent and (ii) for joint committees already sub-divided along a local line. We conclude that the present Belgian wage bargaining system which combines interprofessional, industry and firm bargaining, already includes the mechanisms that allow regional productivity to be taken into account in wage formation. It is therefore not necessary to further regionalise wage bargaining in Belgium.

Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

The objective of this research is to establish consistency thresholds linked to alpha (α) levels for HDM’s (Hierarchical Decision Model) judgment quantification method. Measuring consistency in order to control it is a crucial and inseparable part of any AHP/HDM experiment. The researchers on the subject recommend establishing thresholds that are statistically based on hypothesis testing, and are linked to the number of decision variables and (α) level. Such thresholds provide the means with which to evaluate the soundness and validity of an AHP/HDM decision. The linkage of thresholds to (α) levels allows the decision makers to set an appropriate inconsistency tolerance compatible with the situation at hand. The measurements of judgments are unreliable in the absence of an inconsistency measure that includes acceptable limits. All of this is essential to the credibility of the entire decision making process and hence is extremely useful for practitioners and researchers alike. This research includes distribution fitting for the inconsistencies. It is a valuable and interesting part of the research results and adds usefulness, practicality and insight. The superb fits obtained give confidence that all the statistical inferences based on the fitted distributions accurately reflect the HDM’s inconsistency measure.

En este artículo se revisa el manejo del concepto de las variables y las unidades de análisis (sujetos)en la investigación empírica en Economía. Se incorporan ideas desde otras áreas cuantitativas, yse ordenan en un marco metodológico. Se presenta una taxonomía de las variables y se discutenaspectos metodológicos que se derivan de ella. Se sugiere que el reflexionar sobre la naturalezade las variables y sujetos desde el inicio del trabajo empírico es una tarea que debe ser parte de laformulación misma de teorías, hipótesis o ideas involucradas en el trabajo empírico económico.El lenguaje usado es no técnico para captar el interés de audiencias más amplias. -- This article reviews the concept of variables and units of analysis (subjects) in empirical researchin economics. It incorporates ideas from other quantitative areas, and are arranged in a conceptualframework. We present a taxonomy for the variables and units and discuss methodologicalissues that arise from the framework. We suggest that the reflection on the nature of the variablesand subjects from the beginning of the research is a task which should be part of the formulationof theories, hypothesis or ideas involved in the empirical economic research. We use non technicallanguage to call the attention from a wider audience.

Thesis (DTech (Mechanical Engineering))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2012
In this thesis, we investigate certain key aspects of mathematical modelling to explain the epidemiology of HIV/AIDS at the workplace and to assess the potential benefits of proposed control strategies. Deterministic models to investigate the effects of the transmission dynamics of HIV/AIDS on labour force productivity are formulated. The population is divided into mutually exclusive but exhaustive compartments and a system of differential equations is derived to describe the spread of the epidemic. The qualitative features of their equilibria are analyzed and conditions under which they are stable are provided. Sensitivity analysis of the reproductive number is carried out to determine the relative importance of model parameters to initial disease transmission. Results suggest that optimal control theory in conjunction with standard numerical procedures and cost effective analysis can be used to determine the best intervention strategies to curtail the burden HIV/AIDS is imposing on the human population, in particular to the global economy through infection of the most productive individuals. We utilise Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle to derive and then analyze numerically the conditions for optimal control of the disease with effective use of condoms, enlightenment/educational programs, treatment regime and screening of infectives. We study the potential impact on productivity of combinations of these conventional control measures against HIV. Our numerical results suggest that increased access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) could decrease not only the HIV prevalence but also increase productivity of the infected especially when coupled with prevention, enlightenment and screening efforts.

This study tested the relationship of the personality variable of hardiness to the organisational outcomes of job satisfaction, performance and intention to turnover. These relationships were also tested via two alternative transactional models, with a sequential and simultaneous structure for the appraisal and coping processes. Employees (N = 297) from a range of large New Zealand organisations completed a questionnaire on hardiness, appraisal, coping, affect and the three distal outcomes. Bivariate correlations revealed significant positive relationships between hardiness and job satisfaction, hardiness and performance, and a significant negative relationship with intention to turnover. Structural equation modelling results revealed that the direct relationship between hardiness and job satisfaction was the strongest path, which indicates that the higher an employees level of hardiness the higher their likely level of job satisfaction. The simultaneous model provided best fit to the data, revealing a positive path from hardiness through challenge appraisals to positive affect, and a negative path through threat appraisal and emotion-focused coping. This study concludes that higher levels of hardiness are associated with more positive situational appraisals and more effective coping responses.

Chapter 1 discusses the econometric pitfalls associated with the use of patent production functions to study the invention process. It then goes on to argue that a sound understanding of the invention process necessarily requires an understanding of the propensity to patent. The empirical analysis carried out in Chapter 1 seeks to explain the proportion of inventions patented – a potential metric for the propensity to patent – from an international sample of manufacturing firms.

Chapter 2 proposes a methodology to filter out the noise induced by varying patent practices in the R&D-patent relationship. The methodology explicitly decomposes the patent-to-R&D ratio into its components of productivity and propensity. It is then applied to a novel data set of priority patent applications in four countries and six industries.

Chapter 3 takes stock of the literature on the role of fees in patent systems while Chapter 4 presents estimates of the price elasticity of demand for patents at the trilateral offices (that is, in the U.S. Japan and Europe). The estimation of dynamic panel data models of patent applications suggests that the long-term price elasticity is about -0.30.

Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Consider the following questions in the early stage of new product development. What should be the target market for proposed design concepts? Who will be the competitors and how fast are they moving forward in terms of performance improvements? Ultimately, is the current design concept and targeted launch date feasible and competitive? To answer these questions, there is a need to integrate the product benchmarking with the assessment of performance improvement so that analysts can have a risk measure for their R&D target setting practices. Consequently, this study presents how time series benchmarking analysis can be used to assist scheduling new product releases. Specifically, the proposed model attempts to estimate the "auspicious" time by which proposed design concepts will be available as competitive products by taking into account the rate of performance improvement expected in a target segment. The empirical illustration of commercial airplane development has shown that this new method provides valuable information such as dominating designs, distinct segments, and the potential rate of performance improvement, which can be utilized in the early stage of new product development. In particular, six dominant airplanes are identified with corresponding local RoCs and, inter alia, technological advancement toward long-range and wide-body airplanes represents very competitive segments of the market with rapid changes. The resulting individualized RoCs are able to estimate the arrivals of four different design concepts, which is consistent with what has happened since 2007 in commercial airplane industry. In addition, the case study of the Exascale supercomputer development is presented to demonstrate the predictive use of the new method. The results indicate that the current development target of 2020 might entail technical risks considering the rate of change emphasizing power efficiency observed in the past. It is forecasted that either a Cray-built hybrid system using Intel processors or an IBM-built Blue Gene architecture system using PowerPC processors will likely achieve the goal between early 2021 and late 2022. This indicates that the challenge to improve the power efficiency by a factor of 23 would require the maximum delay of 4 years to reach the Exascale supercomputer compared to the existing performance curve.

My thesis contains essays on voting theory, market structures and fiscal federalism: (i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation, (ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser, (iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics, and (iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance.

(i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation (joint with Micael Castanheira)

In elections, majority divisions pave the way to focal manipulations and coordination failures, which can lead to the victory of the wrong candidate. This paper shows how this flaw can be addressed if voter preferences over candidates are sensitive to information. We consider two potential sources of divisions: majority voters may have similar preferences but opposite information about the candidates, or opposite preferences. We show that when information is the source of majority divisions, Approval Voting features a unique equilibrium with full information and coordination equivalence. That is, it produces the same outcome as if both information and coordination problems could be resolved. Other electoral systems, such as Plurality and Two-Round elections, do not satisfy this equivalence. The second source of division is opposite preferences. Whenever the fraction of voters with such preferences is not too large, Approval Voting still satisfies full information and coordination equivalence.

(ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser

A crucial component of Runoff electoral systems is the threshold fraction of votes above which a candidate wins outright in the first round. I analyze the influence of this threshold on the voting equilibria in three-candidate Runoff elections. I demonstrate the existence of an Ortega Effect which may unduly favor dominated candidates and thus lead to the election of the Condorcet Loser in equilibrium. The reason is that, contrarily to commonly held beliefs, lowering the threshold for first-round victory may actually induce voters to express their preferences excessively. I also extend Duverger's Law to Runoff elections with any threshold below, equal or above 50%. Therefore, Runoff elections are plagued with inferior equilibria that induce either too high or too low expression of preferences.

(iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics

Information on product quality is crucial for buyers to make sound choices. For "experience products", this information is not available at the time of the purchase: it is only acquired through consumption. For much experience products, there exist institutions that provide buyers with information about quality. It is commonly believed that such institutions help consumers to make better choices and are thus welfare improving.

The quality of various experience products depends on the characteristics of buyers. For instance, conversely to the quality of cars, business school quality depends on buyers (i.e. students) characteristics. Indeed, one of the main inputs of a business school is enrolled students. The choice of buyers for such products has then some features of a coordination problem: ceteris paribus, a buyer prefers to buy a product consumed by buyers with "good" characteristics. This coordination dimension leads to inefficiencies when buyers coordinate on products of lower "intrinsic" quality. When the quality of products depends on buyer characteristics, information about product quality can reinforce such a coordination problem. Indeed, even though information of high quality need not mean high intrinsic quality, rational buyers pay attention to this information because they prefer high quality products, no matter the reason of the high quality. Information about product quality may then induce buyers to coordinate on products of low intrinsic quality.

In this paper, I show that, for experience products which quality depends on the characteristics of buyers, more information is not necessarily better. More precisely, I prove that more information about product quality may lead to a Pareto deterioration, i.e. all buyers may be worse off due.

(iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance (joint with Marjorie Gassner and Vincenzo Verardi)

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance (i.e. the dependence of subnational governments on national government revenues to support their expenditures) is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction of the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically, we use some high quality data from the LIS dataset on individual incomes. The results are highly significant and point in the direction of our theoretical predictions.

Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Removal of nitrogenous compounds from precious metal refinery (PMR) wastewater is important in terms of avoiding eutrophication (environmental protection), metal recovery (increased overall process efficiency and value recovery) and reuse of treated water (maximum use of natural resources). Extreme pH conditions (4 to 13 depending on the wastewater stream), high chemical oxygen demand (> 10,000 mg/I), numerous metals and high concentrations of those metals (> 20 mg/l of platinum group metals) in the wastewater are the main challenges for biological removal of nitrogenous compounds from PMR wastewater. Nitrogenous compounds such as NH₄⁺-N and N0₃-N are strong metal ligands, which make it difficult to recover metals from the wastewater. Therefore, a bioprocess was developed for removal of nitrogenous compounds from carefully simulated PMR wastewater. A preliminary investigation of metal wastewater was carried out to determine its composition and physico-chemical properties, the ability to nitrify and denitrify under different pH conditions and denitrification with different carbon Source compounds and amounts. Even at pH 4, nitrification could be carried out. A suitable hydraulic retention time was found to be 72 hours. There was no significant difference between sodium acetate and sodium lactate as carbon sources for denitrification. Based on these results, a reactor comparison study was carried out using simulated PMR wastewater in three types of reactors: continuously stirred tank reactor (CSTR), packed-bed reactor (PBR) and airlift suspension reactor (ALSR). These reactors were fed with 30 mg/l of Rh bound in an NH₄⁺ based compound (Claus salt: pentaaminechlororhodium (III) dichloride). Total nitrogen removal efficiencies of > 68 % , > 79 % and > 45 % were obtained in the CSTR, PBR and ALSR, respectively. Serially connected CSTR-PBR and PBR-CSTR reactor configurations were then studied to determine the best configuration for maximum removal of nitrogenous compounds from the wastewater. The PBR-CSTR configuration gave consistent biomass retention and automatic pH control in the CSTR. Ammonium removal efficiencies > 95 % were achieved in both reactors. As poor nitrate removal was observed a toxicity study was carried out using respirometry and the half saturation inhibition coefficients for Pt, Pd, Rh and Ru were found to be 15.81, 25.00, 33.34 and 39.25 mg/l, respectively. A mathematical model was developed to describe the nitrogen removal in PMR wastewater using activated sludge model number 1 (ASMl), two step nitrification and metal toxicity. An operational protocol was developed based on the literature review, experimental work and simulation results. The optimum reactor configuration under the set conditions (20 mg/I of Rh and < 100 mg/I of NH₄⁺-N) was found to be PBR-CSTR-PBR process, which achieved overall NH₄⁺-N and N0₃⁻-N removal efficiencies of > 90 % and 95 %, respectively. Finally, a rudimentary microbial characterisation was carried out on subsamples from the CSTR and PBRsecondary. It was found that the CSTR biomass consisted of both rods and cocci while PBRsecondary consisted of rods only. Based on these experimental works, further research needs and recommendations were made for optimisation of the developed bioprocess for removal of nitrogenous compounds from PMR wastewater.

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Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)
A demanda por combustível nuclear para reatores de pesquisa está aumentando em nível mundial, enquanto várias de suas fábricas têm pequeno volume de produção. Este trabalho estabeleceu um modelo conceitual com duas estratégias para o aumento da capacidade produtiva dessas fábricas. Foram abordadas as fábricas que produzem elementos combustíveis tipo placa carregados com LEU U3Si2-Al, tipicamente usados em reatores nucleares de pesquisa. A primeira estratégia baseia-se na literatura da área de administração da produção e é uma prática frequente nas fábricas em geral. A segunda estratégia aproveita a possibilidade de desmembrar setores produtivos, comum em instalações de produção de combustível nuclear. Ambas as estratégias geraram diferentes cenários de produção, os quais devem ser seguros em relação à criticalidade. Foram coletados dados de uma fábrica real de combustível nuclear para reatores de pesquisa. As duas estratégias foram aplicadas a esses dados com a finalidade de testar o modelo proposto, o que configurou um estudo de caso. A aplicação das estratégias aos dados coletados deu-se por meio de simulação de eventos discretos em computador. Foram criados diversos modelos de simulação para abranger todos os cenários gerados, de forma que o teste indicou um aumento da capacidade produtiva de até 207% sem necessidade de aquisição de novos equipamentos. Os resultados comprovam que o modelo atingiu plenamente o objetivo proposto. Como principal conclusão pode-se apontar a eficácia do modelo proposto, fato que foi validado pelos dados da fábrica.
Tese (Doutorado em Tecnologia Nuclear)
IPEN/T
Instituto de Pesquisas Energéticas e Nucleares - IPEN-CNEN/SP
CNPq:310274/2012-5

The research performed throughout this dissertation aims at implementing quantitative methods in order to assess economic and technological performances of firms, i.e. it tries to assess the impacts of the determinants of technological activity on the results of this activity. For this purpose, a representative sample of the most important R&D firms in the world is constituted. The micro-economic nature of the analysis, as well as its international dimension are two main features of this research at the empirical level.

The second chapter illustrates the importance of R&D investments, patenting activities and other measures of technological activities performed by firms over the last 10 years.

The third chapter describes the main features as well as the construction of the database. The raw data sample consists of comparable detailed micro-level data on 2676 large manufacturing firms from several countries. These firms have reported important R&D expenditures over the period 1980-1994.

The fourth chapter explores the dynamic structure of the patent-R&D relationship by considering the number of patent applications as a function of present and lagged levels of R&D expenditures. R&D spillovers as well as technological and geographical opportunities are taken into account as additional determinants in order to explain patenting behaviours. The estimates are based on recently developed econometric techniques that deal with the discrete non-negative nature of the dependent patent variable as well as the simultaneity that can arise between the R&D decisions and patenting. The results show evidence of a rather contemporaneous impact of R&D activities on patenting. As far as R&D spillovers are concerned, these externalities have a significantly higher impact on patenting than own R&D. Furthermore, these effects appear to take more time, three years on average, to show up in patents.

The fifth chapter explores the contribution of own stock of R&D capital to productivity performance of firms. To this end the usual productivity residual methodology is implemented. The empirical section presents a first set of results which replicate the analysis of previous studies and tries to assess the robustness of the findings with regard to the above issues. Then, further results, based on different sub samples of the data set, investigate to what extent the R&D contribution on productivity differs across firms of different industries and geographic areas or between small and large firms and low and high-tech firms. The last section explores more carefully the simultaneity issue. On the whole, the estimates indicate that R&D has a positive impact on productivity performances. Yet, this contribution is far from being homogeneous across the different dimensions of data or according to the various assumptions retained in the productivity model.

The last empirical chapter goes deeper into the analysis of firms' productivity increases, by considering besides own R&D activities the impact of technological spillovers. The chapter begins by surveying the alternative ways proposed in the literature in order to asses the effect of R&D spillovers on productivity. The main findings reported by some studies at the micro level are then outlined. Then, the framework to formalize technological externalities and other technological determinants is exposed. This framework is based on a positioning of firms into a technological space using their patent distribution across technological fields. The question of whether the externalities generated by the technological and geographic neighbours are different on the recipient's productivity is also addressed by splitting the spillover variable into a local and national component. Then, alternative measures of technological proximity are examined. Some interesting observations emerge from the empirical results. First, the impact of spillovers on productivity increases is positive and much more important than the contribution of own R&D. Second, spillover effects are not the same according to whether they emanate from firms specialized in similar technological fields or firms more distant in the technological space. Finally, the magnitude and direction of these effects are radically different within and between the pillars of the Triad. While European firms do not appear to particularly benefit from both national and international sources of spillovers, US firms are mainly receptive to their national stock and Japanese firms take advantage from the international stock.

Doctorat en sciences économiques, Orientation économie
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Defence date: 17 December 1990
Examining board: Prof. Alexis Jacquemin, Université Catholique de Louvain and Commission of the European Communities, Brussels ; Prof. Daniel Jones, Cardiff Business School ; Prof. Neil Kay, University of Strathclyde ; Prof. Stephen Martin, thesis supervisor, European University Institute, Flroence ; Prof. Joachim Schwalbach, Freie Univeristät Berlin
PDF of thesis uploaded from the Library digitised archive of EUI PhD theses completed between 2013 and 2017

This thesis examines the channels and mechanisms of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading in the context of economic development. Technological progress is critical for a country's sustainable growth and for the successful transition of a country from imitation to innovation. Therefore, to clarify the main channels and mechanisms driving the accumulation of knowledge and technologies in an economy contributes to an understanding of the sources of economic growth. The specific aspects of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading covered in the thesis include inter-sectoral industrial upgrading, the intensification of R&D activities, a country's tapping into foreign sources of knowledge, and a country's changing position in the global value chain. In studying these channels and mechanisms, in-depth theoretical discussion and quantitative methods are applied. In terms of theoretical discussion, the thesis covers many issues relating to the factors contributing to technological progress and draws our attention to the key aspects of such progress. In terms of quantitative methods, advanced econometric methods such as Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), the estimator from Kyriazidou (1997), the Heckman two-step estimator, the Tobit and Probit estimators and various instrumental variable estimators are employed to address different econometric issues and data structures in model estimations. The thesis finds evidence of the critical role of institutional quality in promoting the productive use of scarce tertiary human capital, in stimulating the Research and Development (R&D) investment of firms, and in attracting R&D investment in host countries by multinational enterprises. The thesis also reveals the importance of human capital as an essential input to the process of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading. A case study of Chinese manufacturing firms clarifies the determinants of firm-level R&D investment, which helps us understand and predict the prospects for innovation in the Chinese economy. By linking firm-level production and customs datasets, the thesis probes into the important question of how trade participation affects innovation in the context of the Chinese economy, which is an especially interesting case due to the huge contribution from trade to China's growth miracle to date. The findings draw attention to processing trade and suggest that under some circumstances deep and long-term engagement in processing trade may adversely influence the R&D investment and innovation prospect of firms. This point reflects the difficulty of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading in a world where global production sharing continues to deepen. Based on the results of empirical and quantitative analyses, several policy suggestions are proposed. These include (1) enhancing institutional quality to accompany other growth-promoting policies, (2) encouraging individual and household-level investment in human capital, (3) nurturing domestic R&D stock and research talents at relatively early stages of development and (4) looking beyond the direct targets of industrial and trade policies to take into account the implications for technological catch-up and industrial upgrading when making such policies. The thesis also points out some directions for future research to extract from the dynamics of the world economy those channels and mechanisms of technological catch-up and industrial upgrading yet unclarified by this thesis.

The service industry has become increasingly competitive. This dissertation addresses a number of outstanding and fundamental questions of competitions in service operations and supply chains. The challenges are characterization of the equilibrium behaviors, estimating the impact of firms' interactions, and designing of efficient market mechanisms. The first chapter of this dissertation considers price competition models for oligopolistic markets, in which the consumer reacts to relative rather than absolute prices, where the relative price is defined as the difference between the absolute price and a given reference value. Such settings arise, for example, when the full retail price earned by the ``retailer" is reduced by virtue of a third party offering a subsidy or a rebate or in prospect theoretical models in which customers establish a reference price and base their choices on the differentials with respect to the reference price. When choosing among the various competing options, the consumer trades off the net price paid with various other product or service attributes, as in standard price competition models. The reference price may be exogenously specified and pre-announced to the competing firms. Alternatively, it may be endogenously determined, as a function of the set of absolute prices selected by the competing firms, for example the lowest or the second lowest price. We characterize the equilibrium behavior under a general reference value scheme of the above type; this in a base model, where we assume that the consumer choice model is of the general MultiNomialLogit (MNL) type. We also derive comparison results for the price equilibria that arise under alternative subsidy schemes. These comparisons have important implications for the design of subsidy schemes. The second chapter applies the results of the first chapter to the Medicare insurance market, both in terms of its existing structure, as well as in terms of various proposals to redesign the program. Based on an oligopoly price competition model tailored towards this market, and actual county-by-county data for the year 2010, we estimate the impact such reforms would have on the plans' market shares, equilibrium premia, the government's cost, and the out-of-pocket expenses of the beneficiaries. We employ two different methodologies to derive the parameters in the county-by-county competition models: (i) a calibration model, and (ii) parameter distributions obtained from models estimated in Curto et al. (2015). The predicted impacts on the above performance measures are remarkably consistent across the two methodologies and reveal, for example, that the government cost would decrease by 8% if the traditional fee-for-service(FFS) plans are kept out of competitive bidding process and by 16.5%-21% if they are part of the process. The third chapter studies a class of buy procurement mechanisms, framework agreements (FAs), that are commonly used by buying agencies around the world to satisfy demand that arises over a certain time horizon. We are one of the first in the literature that provides a formal understanding of FAs, with a particular focus on the cost uncertainty faced by bidders over the FA time horizon. We introduce a model that generalizes standard auction models to include this salient feature of FAs; we analyze this model theoretically and numerically. First, we show that FAs are subject to a sort of winner's curse that in equilibrium induces higher expected buying prices relative to running first-price auctions as needs arise. Then, our results provide concrete design recommendations that alleviate this issue and decrease buying prices in FAs, highlighting the importance of (i) monitoring the price charged at the open market by the FA winner and using it to bound the buying price; (ii) investing in implementing price indexes for the random part of suppliers' costs; and (iii) allowing suppliers the flexibility to reduce their prices to compete with the open market throughout the selling period. These prescriptions are already being used by the Chilean government procurement agency that buys US$2 billion worth of contracts every year using FAs. The fourth chapter considers the preference of contractual forms in supply chains. The supply chain contracting literature has focused on incentive contracts designed to align supply chain members' individual interests. A key finding of this literature is that members' preferences for contractual forms are often at odds: the upstream supplier prefers more complex contracts that can coordinate the supply chain; however, the downstream retailer prefers the wholesale price--only contract because it leaves more surplus (than a coordinating contract) that the retailer can get. This chapter addresses the following question: under what circumstances do suppliers and retailers prefer the same contractual form? We study supply chain members' preference for contractual forms in three different competitive settings in which multiple supply chains compete to sell substitutable products to the same market. Our analysis suggests that both upstream and downstream sides of the supply chains may prefer the same ``quantity discount'' contract, thereby eliminating the conflicts of interest that otherwise typify contracting situations. More interesting still is that both sides may also prefer the wholesale price--only contract, which offers a theoretical explanation to why the simple inefficient contract is widely adopted in supply chain transactions.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1992.
Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-49).

The relevance of domestic and foreign capacity utilization rates in forecasting future inflation rate has been investigated empirically, using five industrialized countries for which the comparable data are available. It has been found that capacity utilization rates, both domestic and foreign, have a long run stable relationship with domestic inflation rate and a positive shock in the capacity utilization rate results in a significant, although a little bit delayed, acceleration in the domestic inflation rate. Various econometric techniques have been used and led to consistent empirical findings. The results in the present study, therefore, dispute the claim that an increase in capacity utilization rate may not necessarily lead to an accelerated inflation down the road.
Graduation date: 1995

The dissertation has three main chapters on product quality innovation. First, we compare innovation effort and social welfare between monopoly, duopoly, and the social planner in a dynamic model with quality dependent on a continuous know-how stock. The technology frontier--the largest reachable know-how socks--does not always positively depend on competitiveness, i.e. a duopoly may technologically surpass the social planner. However, social welfare is always positively tied to competitiveness. Second, with a general equilibrium model, we derive a relative price function expressing productivity and quality effects, and develop a method for inferring relative quality changes. An application to services versus goods of the US from 1946-2006 provides evidence on aggregate quality changes and suggests us to incorporate quality variations when explaining relative prices. Third, we build a two-product model where productivity changes lead to reallocations of labor between quantity production and quality innovation. The correlation between relative productivity and relative quality is negative for low-range substitutability and positive for medium-range substitutability between two products. Looking at services versus goods of the US, the correlation is negative and productivity-driven quality can play a significant role in general quality development.

碩士
國立臺灣大學
經濟學研究所
100
This is a study conducted to explore the role of industrial structure to macroeconomic environment in Taiwan. Initially, by reviewing relevant papers about ways to measure industrial structure、industry and labor market、unemployment rate and economic growth and originating from many research with macro-econometric model, I get a basic idea to establish the model for this topic. While building the macro-econometric model, it is required to divide the economy into many sectors and markets. Linkage among the variables will be connected through the setup of the equation or the function. These linkages can help the model to make a simulation of the way real economy circulates, and this macro-economy will be much well-working just as the structure of the model’s equations becomes complete. To examine the accuracy that model works, it needs to take a look on the prediction of in-sample and out-sample with some criterions. After checking the ability the model works, this study starts to do scenario analysis on this model. First, the fertility rate in Taiwan rises due to government’s promotion of family planning policy, and it aims support for population growth rate.. Second, world oil price increases steadily in following years. Finally, the soft landing of China affects Taiwan. These three cases are highly expected to meet in future. By doing the scenario analysis, it may provide some help to have more comprehension about Taiwan economy’s prospect.