Patenting and Invention Activity of U.S. Scientists and Engineers in the Academic Sector: Comparisons with Industry

Analyses have been performed of the patenting and invention activity of U.S. scientists and engineers (S&Es) in the academic sector and comparisons have been made with their counterparts in industry. The analyses are based upon survey questions concerning patent applications, grant awards and commercialization outcomes from two 1995 National Science Foundation (NSF) nationally representative workforce surveys. A series of new indicators – patent activity rates, patent activity shares and patent success rates – has been defined and utilized to examine patent activity by employment sector, educational field, demographic variables, status and location of university faculty, technological area, and selected S&E job characteristics. It is recommended that NSF collect data on patenting activity, including commercialization outcomes, in its surveys of the S&E workforce at least every four years. Data should also be collected on university-industry collaboration in patent activity in the U.S., and between S&Es in the U.S. and other countries.     

Predatory Innovation: A Step Beyond? (Understanding Competition in High-technology Markets)

The idea of a direct relationship between innovation and progress must be reconsidered. Innovation, in other periods of History merely pursued for the sake of Mankind, eventually turned into an grail for companies willing to see their sales increased. The last decades had witnessed another turn of the screw in that identification: innovation may be used as a weapon to destroy rivals and take over a market, regardless of any considerations of progress. Competition law is not foreign to these new circumstances. The inclusion of innovation as a variable in the context of an exclusionary strategy entails not only an important aggression to free competition, but to social welfare. Due to the novelty of these practices, competition law is still adapting itself to the new scenario. This paper explains the underlying complexity of the study of predatory innovation, establishing the foundations for its proper understanding and subsequent approach of the conclusions to market operators, legislators, judges and to society itself.     

Non-farm Income and Employment in Rural Honduras: Assessing the Role of Locational Factors

This article emphasises the role of locational factors in the determination of rural non-farm (RNF) employment possibilities in rural Honduras. It finds that while RNF wage jobs are predominantly located close to urban areas, RNF self-employment jobs are geographically dispersed around the country, depending on local motors such as a profitable agricultural activity, an important road, or a tourist attraction. In all, the importance of RNF income for rural households (31.3 per cent of total income) suggests that the RNF sector should be considered when designing policies to improve the capabilities and livelihood of the rural Honduran.     

Armed conflict,land grabs and primitive accumulation in Colombia: micro processes,macro trends and the puzzles in between

Armed conflict is widely believed to disrupt agricultural production and ‘reverse’ development, but it may also involve the violent transformation of rural economies from subsistence to commercial agriculture. The case of Las Pavas, an estate in northern Colombia, provides further evidence that armed conflict created opportunities for violent land grabs and the expansion of commercial agriculture in Colombia. However, aggregate data suggest that primitive accumulation may be only part of the story behind the massive scale of forced displacement and dispossession. A research strategy that accounts for the diversity of subnational contexts, processes and outcomes is needed.     

The dynamics of rural poverty in Latin America

The development and perpetuation of a functional dualism between the subsistence sector and the commodity‐producing sector is an objective outcome of the laws of capital accumulation in the periphery of the world capitalist system. The necessity for this dualism derives from the drive of capitalists to maximise profits and thus maintain low wages. Its possibility arises from social disarticulation whereby labour's income does not participate in expanding the market for the modern sector. Through dualism, surplus value is increased not only by the orthodox means of central economies—principally increasing the productivity of work to reduce necessary labour embodied in wage goods—but, in addition, and dramatically more effectively, by collapsing the price of agricultural labour by an amount equal to the production of use‐values by the worker's family in the subsistence plot. In this way, subsistence agriculture supplies cheap labour to commercial agriculture which, in turn, supplies cheap food to the urban sector where it sustains low wages. Socially disarticulated accumulation and functional dualism between capitalist and precapitalist modes perpetuate primitive accumulation in the modern sector based on surplus extraction from the peasant sector fundamentally via the labour market. This specific form of overexploitation of rural labour implies a particular dynamic in the use of labour and natural resources in subsistence agriculture. The pattern of rural poverty and the subjective contradictions of peripheral capitalism can thus largely be understood by identifying the antagonistic contradictions to which the subsistence economy is subject in adjusting to domination.     

Internal dealing regulation and insiders’ trades in the Italian financial market

We analyze insiders’ trades in the Italian financial market. Insiders buy undervalued stocks, but they also act as positive feedback traders. They exploit short term market movements with abnormal returns around trades: they purchase (sell) stocks after a price decline (increase) and trades are followed by a partial reversal. They time the market mainly through purchases immediately communicated to the market and sales (and in part purchases) communicated quarterly to the market. It seems that insiders do not manipulate the market but strategically choose the size of trades, while they are interested to disclose immediately purchases of the assets of the company they prefer not to do it in case of sales. JEL Classification: G14, G15