Empirical estimates of the private value of patent protection are derived for four technology areas—computers, textiles, combustion engines, and pharmaceuticals—using new patent data for West ...Germany, 1953–1988. Patentees must pay renewal fees to keep their patents in force as well as legal expenses in order to enforce them. A dynamic stochastic discrete choice model of optimal renewal decisions is developed incorporating both learning and depreciation as well as the potential need to prosecute infringement. The evolution of the distribution of returns over the life of a group of patents is calculated for each technology using a minimum distance simulation estimator. Results indicate that the aggregate value of protection generated per year is on the order of 10% of related R&D expenditure.
If consumers become pessimistic about the state of the economy, can there be a slowdown in output, even if their pessimism is not based on economic fundamentals? Recent macroeconomic models show the ...answer is yes, if there are “strategic complementarities” and multiple equilibria. We investigate the link between consumer confidence and economic fluctuations using vector autoregressions. In all models, after controlling for economic fundamentals, the hypothesis that consumer sentiment does not cause GNP (in the Granger sense) can be rejected. Variance decompositions suggest that consumer sentiment accounts for between 13 and 26 percent of the innovation variance of GNP.
Econometric techniques designed to accommodate nonstationary data are used to re-examine the stability of interest and income elasticities of money demand in the United States. Estimates based on ...post-war monthly data reveal a stable relationship between M1 velocity and various measures of interest rates that proxy the opportunity cost of holding money balances. Tests for the existence of cointegration and methods used to estimate the income and interest elasticities are based on procedures prescribed by Johansen (1988). Corresponding error correction estimates offer insight as to the dynamics of the process that maintains the equilibrium relation between velocity and interest rates.
Analysis is presented of the comparative macroeconomic performance of the Bretton Woods System of pegged exchange rates and the post-Bretton Woods float. The change in volatility of prices and output ...following the shift to floating does not appear to have been associated with differences in underlying aggregate-supply and aggregate-demand shocks. Rather, under fixed rates, monetary policy had to be adjusted to stabilize the exchange rate, flattening the demand curve and thereby increasing the output response and reducing the price response to aggregate supply shocks. Following the shift to floating, monetary policy was freed, steepening the demand curve and increasing price volatility relative to output volatility.
This study investigates productivity growth in broad-acre agriculture in Western Australia. Tornqvist indices of three output groups (crops, sheep products and other) and five input groups ...(livestock, materials and services, labour, capital and land) are constructed and discussed. Indices of total output and total inputs are also derived and used to form an index of total factor productivity, that is observed to grow at an average annual rage of 2.7%. The input and output indices are also used in the estimation of output supply and input demand equations, derived from a flexible profit function. The Generalized McFadden functional form is used, because it is possible to impose global curvature upon it without loss of flexibility. Asymptotic chi-square tests reject the hypotheses of Hicks-neutral technical change in inputs and in outputs. Technical change is observed to be `materials and services' saving relative to the other input groups, and also appears to favour wool and sheepmeat production relative to the other output groups.
The econometric techniques developed by Engle and Hendry (1993) are used to examine empirically the exogeneity status of the real export growth variable in a commonly used output growth equation. ...Data from Taiwan shows that, while the weak exogeneity assumption appears to be valid, the super exogeneity assumption is rejected. Thus, the results cast doubt on policy recommendations based on the export-led growth hypothesis.
Americans expressed declining negativity toward the Soviets from 1953 until 1974, then rising hostility until 1982-1983, with another decline between 1983 and 1988. Problems in interpreting such ...survey data are discussed, including discrepancies between closed and open questions. Survey data are used to explore two plausible theories about anti-Soviet attitudes in the United States : that such attitudes are (a) primarily ideological, or (b) that they are mainly a function of U.S. nationalism. Data support the latter. (Abstract amended)
The paper investigates empirically the determinants of political stability in one-party states, taking as an example socialist Yugoslavia. We assume that the number of the Party members is an ...indicator of the stability of the regime and perform a time series analysis for the six Yugoslav republics in the 1953-1988 period. We find that rents distributed to the population were far more important than the popularity of economic policies and perhaps even more important than repression. These findings provide strong empirical support for economic models of dictatorship based on the notion of political exchange.
When forward-looking individuals face binding borrowing constraints, consumption will exhibit "excess sensitivity" to lagged variables which are correlated with income. However, the predictive ...capacity of such variables for consumption growth should diminish when contemporaneous and future income terms are used as regressors. U.S. data confirm these expectations. But the data from three other industrial countries are not consistent with either borrowing constraints or other leading Permanent Income Hypothesis (PIH) variants. The evidence from all sample countries suggests that variables correlated with future income might be used to re-examine the inconclusive evidence for the PIH from household data.
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