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This paper reviews catch-up growth in various parts of the world, especially in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on what this implies for the Global South. In 1950, US per capita national income, adjusted for purchasing power, was nearly five times the world average. Since then, Western Europe and Japan have closed their per capita income gaps with the USA. East Asia, South Asia and some other developing countries have also started to close their gaps with the West in recent decades. Thus, after well over a century of growing international economic disparities or divergence, the world has witnessed an era of uneven catching up with the North in parts of the South since the mid-twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stem cell research has emerged as a state-level science and technology policy issue in recent years in the USA, with some states supporting research in the field and others choosing to restrict it. In this paper, we systematically explore the factors that are associated with US states’ adoptions of both supportive and restrictive stem cell policies. Our analysis identifies several factors, including partisan politics, existing morality policies, the strength of a state’s scientific community and the policy environment in neighboring states, which influence the adoption of state stem cell policies. Our paper aims to advance the science and technology policy literature by providing insight into the factors that push states to adopt science policies when economic development goals conflict with ethical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out theory and measurement of how intangible investment might capture innovation and what data on intangibles look like for the EU, Japan, and the US. We also look at complementarities between information and communications technology (ICT) and intangibles, spillovers from intangibles to growth, and policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the effects of financialisation and functional income distribution on aggregate demand in the USA by estimating the effects of the increase in rentier income (dividends and interest payments) and housing and financial wealth on consumption and investment. The redistribution of income in favour of profits suppresses consumption, whereas the increase in the rentier income and wealth has positive effects. A higher rentier income decreases investment. Without the wealth effects, the overall effect of the changes in distribution on aggregate demand would have been negative. Thus a pro-capital income distribution leads to a slightly negative effect on growth, i.e. the USA economy is moderately wage-led. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most analyses of the US financial crisis of 2007–2009 focus on the proximate causes. This article sees the crisis as a consequence of the decline of a long-term pattern of accumulation in the USA and seeks to outline the requirements for a new period of dynamic economic growth. Drawing on work done by the French Regulation theorists and the US analysts of Social Structures of Accumulation, the paper attempts to describe the types of institutional changes that would be needed to spark a new period of stable economic growth in the USA and in the rest of the world economy. The paper outlines what a green mass consumption economy might involve. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We construct a simple endogenous growth model to analyse the relationship between the composition of fiscal policy, economic growth and employment. The government sets different tax rates on labour income, capital income, and private consumption to finance productive expenditures, utility-enhancing consumption expenditures, and transfers related to structural non-employment. Our model is able to explain the different employment and growth records of European Countries and the US since the 1990s. We use the model to investigate the strength of the effects of various fiscal policy shocks on steady state employment and growth. We also develop the transitional dynamics for many variables, including welfare. Our results highlight the trade-offs that may occur between performance indicators, and between the short and the long-run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exporting is often touted as a way to increase economic growth. This paper examines the interaction between exporting and productivity growth in US manufacturing. While exporting plants have substantially higher productivity levels, there is no evidence that exporting increases plant productivity growth rates. The higher productivity of exporters largely predates their entry into exporting. However, within the same industry, exporters do grow faster than non-exporters in terms of both shipments and employment. Exporting is associated with the reallocation of resources from less efficient to more efficient plants. In the aggregate, these reallocation effects are quite large, making up over 40 per cent of total factor productivity growth in the manufacturing sector. Half of this reallocation to more productive plants occurs within industries and the direction of the reallocation is towards exporting plants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we present an overview of GDP and productivity growth patterns in OECD countries over the past decade, on the basis of harmonized data. Our evidence suggests that fast‐growing countries generally shared three characteristics: improvements in labour utilization; a generalized enhancement in human capital; and rapid shifts in the composition of physical capital towards information and communication technology (ICT) equipment. Particularly, we show that technological change embodied in new ICT capital goods has been a primary source of output and productivity growth in ICT‐using sectors. The international comparison allows relating growth patterns to institutional and policy indicators, thereby offering some preliminary insights into the potential sources of growth disparities. Cross‐country evidence yields some tentative support to the idea that institutional factors affecting competition in the product market are likely to affect productivity patterns, especially in a period of rapid diffusion of a general‐purpose technology (such as ICT). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on the apparent bulimia of US consumers and its role in the recent crisis. We seek to show how various characteristics of American society and the US economy are related to this phenomenon. We illustrate some structural features of the US economy and public policies that may have created a difference, in terms of patterns of consumption and market participation, between the USA and continental Europe. We then present some explanations of US hyperconsumerism put forward by psychologists and sociologists, thus relating this phenomenon to the decline in subjective well-being and social capital documented in the USA. We also discuss how the negative endogenous growth paradigm may help to account for it. Finally, we review the debate on the US policy agenda by underlining some weaknesses in the two politically more realistic options and by outlining a third policy strategy, which is possibly preferable for people’s long-term well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic developers often celebrate making crafts for a living as a growing sector and positive career choice in these difficult economic times. Craft-making has not only been defined as a viable business choice but has also emerged as a thriving multibillion-dollar industry during the global economic recession. What seems like a lucrative business opportunity and successful career, however, is laden with difficulties and contradictions. The current economic drivers of the ‘third wave of crafting’ are not the crafters themselves, but craft support companies whose business strategies often contradict the political ideals on which today’s craft movement is built. This paper sheds light on the differing components of the craft-making sector and addresses some limitations of the creative class thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relationship between creative class indicators and economic health in mid-sized American metropolitan areas before and during the Great Recession. Our primary research question is whether more creative communities have been able to avoid the widespread downturn at the end of the last decade, or at least suffer a more limited decline than communities with less presence of creative class. We find that highly creative metropolitan areas are as likely to suffer an economic decline that is as severe as that of their less creative peers. Moreover, key creative measures, such as immigrant populations, are negatively related to economic health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates, using data from the United States and the Euro Area, a two-country stochastic growth model in which both neutral and investment-specific technology shocks are nonstationary but cointegrated across economies. The results point to large and persistent swings in productivity, both favorable and adverse, originating in the United States but not transmitted to the Euro Area. More specifically, the results suggest that while the Euro Area missed out on the period of rapid investment-specific technological change enjoyed in the United States during the 1990s, it also escaped the stagnation in neutral technological progress that plagued the United States in the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines a new approach to measuring local quality of place. It uses a national database of some 500 types of local amenities to measure the local ‘scene’ in every US zip code. It provides a brief tour through the American ‘scenescape’ at the national, regional, urban and neighbourhood levels by outlining variations in types of amenities and the values they support, such as tradition, self-expression, transgression or local authenticity. And it shows that scenes with a strong self-expressive dimension promote growth and innovation while enhancing the economic impacts of technology clusters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a simple model to analyse how a lack of political competition may lead to policies that hinder economic growth. We test the predictions of the model on panel data for the US states. In these data, we find robust evidence that lack of political competition in a state is associated with anti-growth policies: higher taxes, lower capital spending, and a reduced likelihood of using right-to-work laws. We also document a strong link between low political competition and low income growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper suggests that inequality in the distribution of landownership adversely affected the emergence of human-capital promoting institutions ( e.g. public schooling), and thus the pace and the nature of the transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries. The prediction of the theory regarding the adverse effect of the concentration of landownership on education expenditure is established empirically based on evidence from the beginning of the 20th century in the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the rivalry between Great Britain and the U.S. in colonizing China in early and midnineteenth century. According to historians, the inception of U.S. China policy occurred in the nineteenth century during the proclamation of the Open Door policy and the possession of the Philippines as means to access the China market. The federal government colonized China to improve its economy and to increase its international influence in East Asia.

Mounting evidence suggests that economic dynamism and entrepreneurial activity are declining in the United States. Over the past 30 years, the annual number of new business startups and the pace of job reallocation have declined significantly. We ask whether this decline in dynamism can be explained by federal regulation. We combine measures of dynamism with RegData, a novel dataset leveraging the text of the Code of Federal Regulations to create annual measures of the total quantity of regulation by industry. We find that rising federal regulation cannot explain secular trends in economic dynamism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We take up Cochrane's (2011) challenge to identify the firm characteristics that provide independent information about average U.S. monthly stock returns by simultaneously including 94 characteristics in Fama-MacBeth regressions that avoid overweighting microcaps and adjust for data-snooping bias. We find that while 12 characteristics are reliably independent determinants in non-microcap stocks from 1980 to 2014 as a whole, return predictability sharply fell in 2003 such that just two characteristics have been independent determinants since then. Outside of microcaps, the hedge returns to exploiting characteristics-based predictability also have been insignificantly different from zero since 2003. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers several key aspects of recent central bank purchase programs involving longer-term government securities in the United States (where the programs are termed ‘large-scale asset purchases’) and the United Kingdom (where the programs are labeled ‘asset purchases financed by the issuance of central bank reserves’, or ‘quantitative easing’). Aspects of the purchase programs discussed include the scale of the programs, the historical and institutional background behind the programs, their effects on long-term interest rates and the equivalent effect expressed in terms of policy rates, and the reaction of aggregate demand to the programs. An analysis of the early stages of the economic recovery suggests that, by bolstering nominal spending and purchasing power, the asset purchases helped to secure positive real growth in the United Kingdom in 2010 in the face of adverse price-level shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Existing views of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration’s policies in Latin America have tended to portray its approach as being either fixated upon waging the Cold War, or overly concerned with quelling outbreaks of Latin American economic nationalism. Eisenhower’s approach has been viewed as regressive and reactionary; more concerned with political stability than economic and social progress. This view, moreover, has been strengthened by the actions of Eisenhower’s successor – John F. Kennedy’s announcement of the Alliance for Progress, and the prominent role played by Modernization Theory in his administration’s approach toward the developing world, have been viewed as a stark contrast to what had come before. This article challenges that prevailing view, however, by examining the Eisenhower administration’s economic policy towards Brazil. In developmental terms, it will be argued, Eisenhower’s approach was not so very different from Kennedy’s: the methods and theoretical underpinnings between the two administrations may have differed, but what they ultimately wanted to achieve – flourishing nation states that were prosperous, pro-American, and ultimately democratic – remained a constant goal. Like Kennedy, Eisenhower’s approach was constructed on a singular belief in the best way for a nation to develop; it was a standpoint that, due to the country’s economic potential, could be most clearly identified in Brazil. In examining Eisenhower’s economic approach toward Brazil, therefore, this article suggests that there is a compelling need for us to reperiodize the era of Modernization with regard to US developmental policy in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The conversion of university research into economic growth is vital for the future of many nations. In order to improve the efficiency of this transfer, we have looked at the effectiveness of technology transfer activity in the USA. Our research indicates that universities that are not located in a region with a supportive innovation system should modify their mission and methods for technology transfer. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the authors develop an overview of the problem and recommend three new strategies for effective technology transfer including the application of regional dynamic knowledge networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article describes Herbert Hoover's determination to use the economic relationship between the U.S. and Latin America in the public and private realms to promote the cause of peace after the First World War. The author argued that Hoover failed to achieve his coveted objective because of his acceptance of a natural division of labor globally. He identified Latin America in a purely economic sense as potentially a vast marketplace for his country's manufactured and agricultural products, as a source of basic raw materials for industries. In his memoirs Hoover recalled that, although Latin America provided a receptive market for capital from the U.S., some of the loans bankers made to Latin America had been of a dubious quality

As a remedy for the notorious deficiency of pre-Civil War U. S. macroeconomic data, this study introduces an annual index of American industrial production consistently defined from 1790 until World War I. The index incorporates 43 quantity-based annual series (most entirely new) in the manufacturing and mining industries in a manner similar to the Federal Reserve Board's monthly industrial production index. The index changes our view of the growth and volatility of the U. S. economy before World War I. A direct implication of the index is that antebellum-postbellum differences in industrial volatility are statistically indistinguishable. The index also demonstrates that the pernicious deflationary depressions that purportedly followed the financial panics in 1837 and 1873 were actually rather mild recessions when expressed in real output. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the sources of U.S. labour productivity growth in the late 1990s and presents projections for both output and labour productivity growth. We show that investment in information technology (IT) played a substantial role in the U.S. productivity revival and that similar trends are evident in data for other leading OECD countries. We then outline a methodology for projecting trend output and pro-ductivity growth for the broadly defined U.S. economy. Our base-case projection puts trend productivity growth at 1.78 percent per year over the next decade with a range of 1.14 to 2.38 percent, reflecting fundamental uncertainties about the rate of technical progress in IT-production and investment in IT-equipment and software. Our central projection is below the average growth rate of 2.07 percent during 1995 -2000. Similar projections for Europe must await more complete information. (JEL J2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concepts of σ-convergence, absolute β-convergence and conditional β-convergence are discussed in this paper. The concepts are applied to a variety of data sets that include a large cross-section of 110 countries, the sub-sample of OECD countries, the states within the United States, the prefectures of Japan, and regions within several European countries. Except for the large cross-section of countries, all data sets display strong evidence of σ-convergence and absolute β-convergence. The cross-section of countries exhibits σ-divergence and conditional β-convergence. The speed of conditional convergence, which is very similar across data sets, is close to 2% per year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Metropolitan communities in the United States are interdependent. Each metropolis serves the economy through its key functions while at the same time it depends on other metropolises and systems for some of its own needs. Using 1960 data for SMSAs, this paper demonstrates that a community's position in this differentiated system influences the characteristics of its population. Two perspectives for determining a metropolitan community's key functions are used: one considers economic activities one at a time; the other considers the entire configuration of these activities at once. These two procedures are compared in their ability to identify groups of communities having distinctive social structures, as indicated by occupational and educational composition, income level, age and sex structure, and ability to attract and hold migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines why Canadian poverty rates fell relative to U. S. poverty rates during the periods 1970-1979 and 1979-1986. During the 1970s the principal reason for declining Canadian poverty rates is higher economic growth. During the 1980s, however, differences in government transfer policy are the main cause of relative poverty change in the two countries. Virtually all of the 3.3 point fall in relative Canadian/U.S. poverty rates from 1979 to 1986 can be attributed to expansions in the Canadian transfer system and simultaneous contractions in U. S. transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article classifies the role of speculators in economic activity of the U.S. Most noneconomists would probably argue that speculation is socially undesirable for two reasons. First, speculation increases uncertainty about the future by creating disturbances and fluctuations in the economy. Second, by engaging in speculative activity, traders who exert an important influence in a market may be able to make profits at the expense of smaller traders who are not primarily involved in the market for speculative purposes.

The issue of dynamic efficiency is central to analyses of capital accumulation and economic growth. Yet the question of what characteristics should examined to determine whether actual economics are dynamically efficient is unresolved. This paper develops a criterion for determining whether an economy is dynamically efficient. The criterion, which holds for economies in which technological progress and population growth are stochastic, involves a comparison of the cash flows generated by capital with the level of investment. Its application to the United States economy and the economies of other major OECD nations suggests that they are dynamically efficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the last decade the major international agencies have forecast the possibilities for the world economy. This paper reviews these efforts. It finds that the forecasts of the agencies for the economic growth rates of the industrial and developing countries have been systematically biased, while their estimates of the locomotive effect for developing countries have become ambiguous. There has also been a systematic shift in the forecasting methods used by the agencies. In part, this pattern reflects the need to rationalize forecasts within the context of a particular theoretical-ideological perspective, increasingly strengthened by the influence of the present United States administration. Peer group and institutional pressures within the interagency system have resulted in a misplaced consensus about long-term trends, and have undermined the potential benefits of the forecasting exercise. The dangers of biased or unreliable forecasts are evident, given the influence of the forecasts on the planning activities and the style of development of so many developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the relationship between economic growth and the extent of poverty among American families in order to find ways to reduce the poverty. The income distribution stretches as average income grows; if this were not true, poverty would long since have ceased to be a problem. In colonial times, the income gap between the very poor and all but the very rich must have been at most a few hundred dollars. Since the median income in the U.S. now is well above any upper bound of poverty, if the dispersion of income had remained constant as its central tendency grew, no one would now be poor. But the dispersion of income expands along with its central tendency. The quintile boundaries of the income distribution rise approximately by the same percentages, thus bringing widening absolute differentials. This accords with our retributive standards of justice; people are rewarded in proportion to their relative degrees of social worth or productivity. It incidentally guarantees the persistence of poverty without public policies designed to redistribute income or earning power.

Recent extensions of the work by Ramsey [4] into the field of optimal economic growth have addressed themselves to describing a theoretical basis for economic planning. The problems associated with the choices of duration and targets for finite plans have been widely discussed and consistent planning is intimately related to an infinite time horizon. The "rational" evaluation of targets is dependent upon their productive value beyond the termination of the finite plan, and thus goals must be specified independently of their returns. The difficulties presented by long term planning involve not only complexities arising from imperfect knowledge but those evolving from the changing of the political electorate as well. While the current population may be concerned with those events in the near future in a much different manner than with those more distant, the passage of time introduces a natural extension of this period of concern. This extension may involve a re-evaluation of future decisions and the attendant change in tastes may necessitate a modification of the original programme. In practice, plans may not be completely executed both for reasons of imperfect foresight or intention. In a rolling plan, the plan is revised at the end of each year and an additional year is appended to the last. The effect of this yearly revision is to always maintain a future planning period of constant length. Part I of this paper is involved with the investigation of the dynamic properties of such rolling plans, within the context of optimal growth theory. The intent is to concentrate attention upon the effects of a continual revision—for whatever underlying reasons —and to effect a comparison with plans of infinite duration. A strong similarity is evident between revised plans and infinite ones—per capita consumption may be described as a function of the capital-labour ratio. This result suggests that the revised plan is optimal for an infinite planning period subject to some suitable redefinition of the criterion function. In part II we shall present conditions under which certain forms of consumption behaviour are formally equivalent to the optimization of a discounted Ramsey type social welfare function. That is, we shall demonstrate the existence of an implicit social welfare function involving individuals at all moments in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the role of credit markets as a cause for changes in the US labour share. Causal evidence is provided that the labour share declined between 0.8 and 1.2 percentage points following the interstate banking deregulation, explaining more than half of the overall reduction during that period. The lower costs of credit and greater bank competition in each state are mechanisms that led to the decline. To quantify the relationship between credit and factor payments, we calibrate a model with financial frictions and highlight financial development as a potential channel for the reduction in labour share observed globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the effects of European immigration to the U.S. during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1920) on economic prosperity. Exploiting cross-county variation in immigration that arises from the interaction of fluctuations in aggregate immigrant flows and of the gradual expansion of the railway network, we find that counties with more historical immigration have higher income, less poverty, less unemployment, higher rates of urbanization, and greater educational attainment today. The long-run effects seem to capture the persistence of short-run benefits, including greater industrialization, increased agricultural productivity, and more innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The biomedical research workforce plays a crucial role in fostering economic growth and improving public health through discoveries and innovations. This study fills a knowledge gap by providing a comprehensive portrait of this workforce and retention within it. A distinguishing feature is that we use an occupation-based definition which allows us to look 'backward' to field of training and assess the extent to which it has grown more interdisciplinary, and how this differs by gender. The analysis is conducted using restricted-use SESTAT data, the most comprehensive dataset on the scientific workforce in the USA, for the years 1993, 2003, and 2010. Among the findings, we identify differences in interdisciplinarity in training by gender, and these differences have widened. In the retention analysis, which focuses on the 7-year period, 2003–10, we find that retention is negatively and significantly associated with interdisciplinary training for women, but not for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between knowledge creation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth in the United States over the last 150 years. Distinguishing between general knowledge and economically useful knowledge, we examine the changes over time in the locus and content of new knowledge creation: the role of universities, particularly engineering schools and land-grant universities, industrial laboratories, and corporate research and development (R&D) laboratories prior to World War II. The practical orientation of US academic R&D and the close research interaction between academia and industry are noted. We study the unprecedented increase in R&D spending in the United States during and after World War II and how it was converted into economic activity via incumbent firms in the early postwar period and increasingly via new ventures in the last few decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article introduces a new nonparametric test to detect jump arrival times and realized jump sizes in asset prices up to the intra-day level. We demonstrate that the likelihood of misclassification of jumps becomes negligible when we use high-frequency returns. Using our test, we examine jump dynamics and their distributions in the U.S. equity markets. The results show that individual stock jumps are associated with prescheduled earnings announcements and other company-specific news events. Additionally, S&P 500 index jumps are associated with general market news announcements. This suggests different pricing models for individual equity options versus index options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Firms that diversify into new and existing industries typically outperform de novo entrants, but in some new industries diversifying firms are displaced by later‐entering de novo firms. Little is known about when and how new firms can overcome the advantages of diversifying firms. This is investigated for one industry, automobiles, where new firms had considerable success. All the entrants into the industry from its inception in 1895 through 1966 are identified. The heritage of every entrant into the industry is traced, including the founders of de novo entrants, to explore how time of entry and pre‐entry experience affected firm survival. While diversifying firms on average outperformed de novo entrants, de novo entrants founded by individuals that worked for the leading automobile firms outperformed all firms and dominated the industry. This is attributed to the novel organizational challenges faced by automobile firms, which made the leading firms ideal training grounds for new entrants. The implications of these findings for firm capabilities, industry competition and regional economic development are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research continues to stress the influence job polarization has had on employment and economic opportunity in the USA. However, much of this literature is based on studies focused on time periods of economic expansion, and the knowledge base lacks a nuanced understanding of structural employment change during economic downturns and the temporally and spatially distinctive dynamics of such shifts. Using an innovative methodology for measuring job quality, the study provides an empirical analysis of employment shifts that occurred during the Great Recession both quantitatively (how many jobs created or destroyed) as well as qualitatively (what types of jobs created or destroyed). A notable feature of the shifts observed in the employment structure during this time period is a deepening pattern of inequality in the labor market characterized by increased wage polarization for all workers and evidence of downgrading experienced by male workers across all three measures of job quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use cross-state panel and cross-U.S. commuting-zone data to look at the relationship between innovation, top income inequality and social mobility. We find positive correlations between measures of innovation and top income inequality. We also show that the correlations between innovation and broad measures of inequality are not significant. Next, using instrumental variable analysis, we argue that these correlations at least partly reflect a causality from innovation to top income shares. Finally, we show that innovation, particularly by new entrants, is positively associated with social mobility, but less so in local areas with more intense lobbying activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how the telecommunications industry is likely to alter the traditional tools and strategies that economic developers use to attract and retain firms. Several case studies reveal that there are several key components in trying to win with telecommunications. The strongest component in all five cases studied is vision. The city of Richardson, Texas encapsulated its vision in the slogan 'Texas Telecom Corridor.' In Singapore, the former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, acted as visionary, using his governmental powers, to sell the idea. In Atlanta, Georgia, its was John Patrick Crecine of the Georgia Institute of Technology who touted a high technology olympics. Besides vision, three other elements played a central role. They are political strategies, technological executives and new network applications.

Outside the US, the commercial development of shale gas and oil will need to overcome significant legal and regulatory challenges if it is ever to take off. This study identifies several key features that have contributed to shale’s economic success in the US and applies them to three country settings where policy decisions have been taken to advance a shale resources agenda: Argentina, Colombia and the United Kingdom. Each country is at an initial stage in the development of its resources and has explored various legal instruments to advance its policy aims. In reviewing their experiences, we may be able to identify the emergence of a dedicated body of good or best practices. The study confirms that governments tend initially to rely heavily on established hydrocarbons regulatory approaches, where they exist, but that these quickly prove fragile or insufficient, and need to be supplemented by new measures and institutions targeted specifically at meeting the challenges arising from ownership, infrastructure (including local content) and consent which may otherwise inhibit investment in this energy sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process by which universities internationalize their education mission and adopt the 'third mission' of economic development in their local region is widely documented. However, little is known about how transnational educational campuses adopt research and economic development functions. This case study draws on interviews, historical documents, and bibliometric and patent analysis to describe the efforts of one of the longest standing US transnational campuses-Georgia Tech Lorraine-to integrate into the Lorraine region of France by adding research and economic development missions. In describing the campus's evolution, this article highlights key markers indicating the transition to novel competencies. The results indicate that the adoption of new missions is characterized by plans, mixed success, and re-orientation rather than by a directed or designed process. Additionally, the study suggests that efforts to transplant successful programs from the home university to the Lorraine campus were less successful than those involving host region-led partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of labor mobility and geographical proximity in the knowledge diffusion process in the US biopharmaceutical industry. The application of social network analysis to patent authorship reveals that labor mobility and co-inventorship are responsible for a large portion of knowledge flows. This finding provides support for recent studies that called into question the notion that technical and commercially valuable knowledge ubiquitously disseminates in hightechnology industrial agglomerations, indicating instead that such an explanation is only partially true. Results also suggest that high quality inventions draw (proportionally) more from nonlocal knowledge sources and that network connections are more important for the transmission of knowledge for high quality patents than for low quality patents. The substantial concentration of local knowledge flows suggests that industrially targeted public financial support for research and development activities at the regional and state levels can be considered as supportive of firm performance and by extension economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate how the reduction of income inequality through tax policy affects economic growth. Taxation at different points of the income distribution has heterogeneous impacts on households' incentives to work, invest, and consume. Using US state-level data and micro-level household tax returns over the last three decades, we find that reducing income inequality between low and median income households improves economic growth. However, reducing income inequality through taxation between median and high-income households reduces economic growth. These asymmetric economic growth effects are attributable both to supply-side factors (i.e. changes in small business activity and labour supply) and to consumption demand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patent-holdup theory avers that the patent system threatens the rate of innovation in the U.S. economy, particularly in information technology industries that are heavily reliant on standard-essential patents. We show that arrays of empirical tests falsify the core predictions of the theory. We therefore examine the logic of patent-holdup theory. We show that patent-holdup theory conflates two mutually inconsistent economic mechanisms: holdup (the appropriation of a quasi rent) and the exercise of monopoly power (to set the market price to extract a monopoly rent). Moreover, three fallacies underpin patent-holdup theory: (1) that patent holdup is a straightforward variant of holdup as it is understood in transaction-cost economics; (2) that royalty stacking is holdup repeated multiple times on the same product; and (3) that standard-essential patents contribute little or no value to the markets they help create. These fallacies give rise to a theory that is logically inconsistent and incomplete, and that ignores economic fundamentals. The flaws in logic of patent-holdup theory, and its lack of fit with the evidence, suggest that a new theory about the mechanics and dynamics of SEP-intensive IT industries is called for, both as a matter of science and as a guide to antitrust and patent policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The antebellum period saw the rise of an enormous agricultural reform movement that brought about important innovations in government policy and established new rural institutions such as the annual fair. Ariel Ron shows that these changes largely reflected the particular pathways of northern economic development and had important consequences for the sectional crisis of the 1850s. But they are also worth considering in their own right if we are to understand a countryside that made up the large majority of antebellum society. We know a lot about farmers at the community and regional levels, but we still know very little about how farmers became increasingly interconnected and organized through the fairs, publications, and societies of the agricultural reform movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use a growth model in which saving, fertility and labour market participation are endogenous, to quantify the cost that barriers to female labour force participation impose in terms of an economy's output. The model is calibrated to mimic the US economy's behaviour in the long-run. We find that a 50% increase in the gender wage gap leads to a 35% decrease in income per capita in the steady state. Using independent estimates of the female to male earnings ratio for a wide cross-section of countries, we construct an economy with parameters similar to those calibrated for the US economy, except for the degree of gender barriers. For several countries, a large fraction of the difference between the country's output and the US output can be ascribed to differences in gender discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On February 26, 2015, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued new regulations for the Internet. A significant stated motivation for these regulations was the protection and promotion of the quality of Internet service. This article provides information about the evolution of the quality of Internet service, providing context for this central stated motivation of Internet regulation, including the merits of rules restricting payments by content providers for priority treatment of certain Internet traffic. The history of the FCC's Internet regulations (or lack thereof) is reviewed, the main arguments for and against imposing ex ante price regulation on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are outlined, and data on industry performance, particularly subscribership levels in general and at substantially increasing speeds, are described. This experience indicates that apparent insufficiencies in competitive alternatives at the fastest available speeds have been ameliorated in fairly short order by new offerings by multiple ISPs. These findings strongly suggest that basing new restrictions on a putative dearth of competition for recently available service levels and transmission speeds is likely to be overtaken by technological and market developments, rendering such ex ante rules at best superfluous and at worst counterproductive to competition and innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]