Multilevel public funding for small business innovation: a review of US state SBIR match programs

US State governments invest in early-stage innovative activity as an economic development strategy. Nevertheless, attention directed at the public sector’s role in this capacity has been placed on federal policy actions overlooking the growing role of states. The primary aims of this paper are two-fold: (1) to articulate the motivations for multilevel public support for small business innovative activity, placing emphasis on state level incentives directed towards entrepreneurial activity; and (2) to empirically evaluate the State Match Phase I (SMP-I) program. The SMP-I program is a diffuse state level policy designed to complement the federal Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program by offering noncompetitive matching funds to the state’s successful SBIR Phase I recipients. This offers an opportunity to examine the marginal impact of public R&D given the state intervention. This paper employs a state and year fixed effects model and considers two outcome variables—SBIR Phase II success rates and SBIR Phase I application activity. To account for industrial heterogeneity, the data are stratified by the federal mission agencies. Results from the empirical analysis indicate that the state match increases the Phase II success rates for firms participating in the National Science Foundation SBIR program.     

Thoreau in the 21<Superscript>st</Superscript> Century

Laura Dassow Walls’s superb biography of Henry David Thoreau is the most important study of this author thus far in the twenty-first century. Beautifully written, and packed with rich detail and subtle interpretation, Walls’s book teaches us much that is new about Thoreau and, furthermore, prompts us to think more deeply about and reassess this complex person and challenging writer—a writer whose range and mass of published and unpublished work, produced during his all too brief life (he died at age 44), is astounding. Thoreau is an inspiring radical voice for personal change and social reform, yet he is, at the same time, extremely self-centered and highly skeptical about the capacity of readers and audiences to bring about the transformations that he advocates.     

Why Have Chinese Reforms Come to a Halt? The Political Economic Logic of Unfinished Transformation

This study approaches the Chinese reform process from a political-economic point of view, focusing primarily on institutional changes. Besides revealing the main factors behind the different phases of the reforms, it argues that in the framework of the current authoritarian regime, vested interests work against the continuation of the reforms, making it impossible to fully establish the institutional framework of a market economy. Current rents and privileges also deter the elite from implementing serious political reforms, leading to a trap that prevents the completion of the transition process.     

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, <Emphasis Type="Italic">March 1917, Node III,The Red Wheel</Emphasis>. Trans. Marian Schwartz

A review of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's March 1917, translated by Marian Schwartz