We also find that there is interdependence in innovational efforts across markets: effort in a given market is correlated with the number of novel drugs of other firms in other markets. This suggests interdependencies across markets that should be part of innovation policy analysis. In chapter 3 I study the relationship between firm size and research and development expenditures in the presence of firm level heterogeneity. I test the Schumpeterian hypothesis that larger firms will invest disproportionately more in R & D.I find that there is no evidence of returns to scale in R & D investment. Small firms are investing a larger fraction of their revenues in R & D.I also find that the relationship between firm size and R & D investment is weaker when heterogeneity is taken into account and the focus is on what happens when firm size increases. These results highlight the importance of dimensions of heterogeneity other than firm size per se as determinants of the relationship of firm size and R & D.
Technology, Innovation and Industrial Economics: Institutional Perspectives, inspired by the work of William E. Cole, Professor Emeritus at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, extends his work with essays on technology, innovation and industrial economics from an Institutionalist perspective. The managerial style, innovational practices and industrial setting of the continuous improvement firm are central to several chapters. This volume also features innovation and technology in Latin America, Adam Smith's writing on entrepreneurship and a comparison of American and European Institutionalism. The topics of technology, innovation, industrial organization and industrial policy are being widely discussed and debated in today's literature, but seldom from an Institutionalist perspective. The purpose of this book is to reduce substantially this missing dimension in the ongoing debates on these important issues.
Edwin Mansfield was a research pioneer into the economics of R and D and technological change. As appreciation and remembrance for his scholarly contributions, eminent scholars have contributed original papers for this edited volume. The authors have followed the "Mansfieldian” approach of emphasizing economic insight and intuition over mathematical rigor and as a result are very accessable. Essays in Honor of Edwin Mansfield has the potential to serve as a reader in all advanced undergraduate and graduate classes/seminars in the economics of R and D and technological change. This edited volume will be the definitive work in the field.
Conventional economic analysis of property rights in natural resources is too narrow and restrictive to allow for effective comparisons between alternative institutional structures. In this book, a conceptual framework is developed for the analysis of the
This thesis is a collection of three chapters that investigate burgeoning empirical issues in industrial organization. In the first chapter, I study platform fee policy with a specific focus on two-sided online marketplaces. The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, I study a setting with coordinated price experimentation along the three different fee dimensions that are common to such marketplaces. Second, I describe the empirical impact of incomplete fee salience on equilibrium outcomes. Finally, I quantify the network externalities that must be present in order for observed fees to constitute an equilibrium. In the paper, I begin by developing a tractable model of the platform’s problem that generates testable predictions and yields equilibrium conditions in terms of estimable quantities. Then, using estimates from experimental data obtained from a large online marketplace, I quantify the salience and network effects. To conclude, I consider the counterfactual level and composition of equilibrium platform fees under when these effects are muted or absent. In the second chapter, using data from the same source as in chapter one, I study small sellers competing on the supply side of online marketplaces. As these platforms grow and markets become increasingly disintermediated, an important concern is whether small sellers, who may have limited experience or attention, can individually compete effectively with larger, often professional sellers operating on the same marketplaces. To answer this question, I develop and estimate a structural model that incorporates essential features of the empirical setting, including large and rapidly changing choice sets and buyer heterogeneity. Using the estimated model, I compute optimal pricing policies under various informational and computational restrictions. I find that small sellers adhering to a simple strategy can obtain nearly optimal expected revenue and that this strategy’s information requirements are easily satisfied in the online setting. Additionally, I present suggestive evidence that sellers learn to approximate such a strategy through repeated market interactions. In the third and final chapter, I investigate the industrial impacts of firm control rights, which confer discretion over firm policy and are usually shared between debt and equity holders. Control rights operate along a continuum and are difficult to measure. As a proxy, I consider the discontinuous shift in control from equity holders to creditors due to loan covenant violations, a common form of technical default. This paper contributes to the growing covenants literature in two ways. First, I consider the impact of and response to covenant violations at the industry level, inclusive of firms never in technical default. Second, I empirically document the effects of violations on contemporary product markets. I find that control rights transfers to creditors make firms tough in product markets, consistent with the predictions of a stylized model, and that markups decline at the industry level, though the declines are sharpest for firms directly affected.
