Foreign direct investment (FDI): friend or foe of non-innovating firms?

The Journal of Technology Transfer - This paper examines the incentives of firms to bypass the innovation process by not pursuing innovation, focusing specifically on whether FDI enables innovation...     

Determinants of software piracy: economics,institutions, and technology

This paper determines the various influences on software piracy using a large sample of countries. In particular, our cross-sectional study estimates the effects of economic, institutional and technical factors on the piracy of software. A more comprehensive look at potential determinants of software piracy, including economic and non-economic factors, may be considered as the main contribution to a literature that is still in its infancy. Results show that a country’s stage of development and the quality of governance have the largest impact on the incidence of software piracy. Greater economic and political freedoms are shown to have opposite effects on piracy. Further, greater diffusion of the Internet and of computer technologies, other things equal, actually promote the legal use of software. Higher access prices also reduce piracy, with the impact of telephone charges being more pronounced than that of Internet access fees. There are significant variations in the impacts of different types of legal institutions and of fractionalization on piracy. The influence of digital divide between rural and urban areas does not significantly affect the piracy of software. Overall, economic, institutional, and technological factors exert important influences on software piracy, albeit with some qualitative and quantitative differences. Policy implications are discussed.     

Rent-Seeking in Research Markets

Using a standard model of uncertain innovation, this paper examines research rivalry and rent-seeking rivalry in innovation markets. Previous literature has not considered the implications of rent-seeking in research markets. We find that greater rent-seeking by the rival unambiguously lowers own profit-maximizing research and rent-seeking activity. On the other hand, greater research spending by the rival also lowers own research and rent-seeking, especially when the probability of own innovation is low. Policy implications are discussed.     

Do Employers Prefer Workers Who Attend For‐Profit Colleges? Evidence from a Field Experiment

This paper reports results from a resume‐based field experiment designed to examine employer preferences for job applicants who attended for‐profit colleges. For‐profit colleges have seen sharp increases in enrollment in recent years despite alternatives, such as public community colleges, being much cheaper. We sent almost 9,000 fictitious resumes of young job applicants who recently completed their schooling to online job postings in six occupational categories and tracked employer callback rates. We find no evidence that employers prefer applicants with resumes listing a for‐profit college relative to those whose resumes list either a community college or no college at all.     

China's Kashmir Policies

The article examines why some ethnic groups seeking ethno-political autonomy engage in violence while others respond with relative quiescence. It compares and contrasts the ethno-political movements of the Bodos and Misings in northeast India and adopts an integrated approach in which the mobilizing structure and state responses assume equal and important roles that determine the correlation between the mobilizing process and levels of contention. A fundamental claim is that popular support and participation are crucial to shape the trajectories and strategies of ethnic movements. What determines the level of popular following is long-term commitment, legitimacy, and effective communicative strategies adopted by activist organizations. This in turn, generates collective mobilization and produces mechanisms for violence. The absence thereof leads to less disruptive contention. Further, the level of ethnic contention is determined by consistency and extent of ethnic accommodation and the nature of state repression. Consistent accommodation can have a countervailing effect on the activists to launch violent rebellion. Accommodation may range from implementing particular ethno-linguistic policies to selective incentives or cooptation of core political activists by the government. Contrarily, inconsistent accommodation and widespread state repression leads to high levels of violence.     

Research spending under regulatory uncertainty

Using a simple model this paper examines firm behavior under three types of uncertainties dealing with innovation occurrence, innovation scale, and a possible threat of regulatory action. Firms compete in the existing product market and engage in R&D in Stage I. Innovation takes place in the second stage, the successful firm achieves a monopoly and becomes aware of the scale of innovation. Regulators examine the new product and decide on possible action. Results show that increases in the probability of regulation reduce research spending as do higher regulatory taxes. These results are reversed when the regulator grants a subsidy, instead. An increase in the probability of drastic innovation increases research spending under certain conditions. The effect of market entry is unclear. Our results generally carry through when the model is extended to include only an innovation race or the nondrastic innovation is alternately regulated. Policy implications are discussed.

On the economic incentives for taking bribes

This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors affecting bribe taking by public officials. Factors influencing the acceptance of bribes include: the probability of being convicted, severity of punishment, government salary relative to private sector income, the demonstration effect, and the unemployment rate. Our results indicate that higher probability of being convicted discourages the acceptance of bribes as does more severe punishment. Low relative earnings, high unemployment, and the demonstration effect of aggregate advertising all lead to increased bribe taking.     

Innovation by foreign researchers: relative influences of internal versus external human capital

The Journal of Technology Transfer - Innovation productivity of expatriate researchers and human capital that empowers them is an important issue; however, with a scarcity of relevant data, formal...     

Decentralization in Kerala: Panchayat government discretion and accountability

Kerala is regarded as one of the most decentralized states in India. Through a ‘big bang’ approach, Kerala implemented a significant fiscal decentralization program and then built the capacity of its local governments. We employ a diagnostic framework to analyze its local government discretion and accountability in political, administrative and fiscal domains. We find that Kerala's local governments have a very high degree of discretionary power accompanied by a high degree of accountability towards citizens. But the areas of administrative accountability and financial management need to be strengthened. Also there may have been excessive focus and investment on social accountability mechanisms at the cost of local government discretion and formal public sector accountability mechanisms. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.