The Impact of Industry Collaboration on Academic Research Output: A Dynamic Panel Data Analysis

The aim of this paper is to analyse the impact of university knowledge and technology transfer activities on academic research output. Specifically, we study whether researchers with collaborative links with the private sector publish less than their peers without such links, once controlling for other sources of heterogeneity. We report findings from a longitudinal dataset on researchers from two engineering departments in the UK between 1985 until 2006. Our results indicate that researchers with industrial links publish significantly more than their peers. Academic productivity, though, is higher for low levels of industry involvement as compared to high levels.

Intra-Industry Trade, Multilateral Trade Integration, and Invasive Species Risk, December 2006

We analyze the linkage between protectionism and invasive species (IS) hazard in the context of two-way trade and multilateral trade integration, two major features of real-world agricultural trade. Multilateral integration includes the joint reduction of tariffs and trade costs among trading partners. Multilateral trade integration is more likely to increase damages from IS than predicted by unilateral trade opening under the classic Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson (HOS) framework because domestic production (the base susceptible to damages) is likely to increase with expanding export markets. A country integrating its trade with a partner characterized by relatively higher tariff and trade costs is also more likely to experience increased IS damages via expanded domestic production for the same reason. We illustrate our analytical results with a stylized model of the world wheat market.

An analisys of suply and Demand Conditions for Cape Verde´s Banana Industry

Michigan State University

The Growth and Direction of the Biodiesel Industry in the United States, 2007

The biodiesel industry in the United States has realized significant growth over the past decade through large increases in annual production and production capacity and a transition from smaller batch plants to larger-scale continuous producers. The larger, continuous-flow plants provide operating cost advantages over the smaller batch plants through their ability to capture co-products and reuse certain components in the production process. This paper uses a simple capital budgeting model developed by the authors along with production data supplied by industry sources to estimate production costs, return-on-investment levels, and break-even conditions for two common plant sizes (30 and 60 million gallon annual capacities) over a range of biodiesel and feedstock price levels. The analysis shows that the larger plant realizes returns to scale in both labor and capital costs, enabling the larger plant to pay up to $0.015 more per pound for the feedstock to achieve equivalent return levels as the smaller plant under the same conditions. The paper contributes to the growing literature on the biodiesel industry by using the most current conversion rates for the production technology and current price levels to estimate biodiesel production costs and potential plant performance, providing a useful follow-up to previous studies.

Entrepreneurship, organization and economic performance among Spanish firms, 1930-1975. The case of the motor industry

Before the Civil War (1936-1939), Spain had seen the emergence offirms of complex organizational forms. However, the conflict andthe postwar years changed this pattern. The argument put forwardin this paper is based on historical experience, the efforts willbe addressed to explain the development of Spanish entrepreneurshipduring the second half of the twentieth century. To illustrate thechange in entrepreneurship and organizational patterns among theSpanish firms during the Francoist regime we will turn to the caseof the motor vehicle industry.

Determinants of organizational form: Transaction costs and institutions in the European trucking industry

We explain why European trucking carriers are much smaller and rely more heavily on owner-operators(as opposed to employee drivers) than their US counterparts. Our analysis begins by ruling outdifferences in technology as the source of those disparities and confirms that standard hypothesesin organizational economics, which have been shown to explain the choice of organizational form inUS industry, also apply in Europe. We then argue that the preference for subcontracting oververtical integration in Europe is the result of European institutions particularly, labor regulationand tax laws that increase the costs of vertical integration.

The drive for quality - the impact on accounting in the wine industry

There is a substancial literature on the accounting procedures needed to trackdown the costs of quality control and quality failure. In a drive for improved quality the changes in the process of production or service delivery will also give rise to new accounting needs. In this article we take one example of an industry, wine production, where in most countries there has been a movement towards expanding higher quality production. We report on interviews with wine producers in the US, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Spain, and identify avariety of ways in which a more sophisticated approach to accounting has become necessary as a result of the drive for quality.

Wage determination in the Spanish industry

In this paper we estimate wage equations for the Spanish industryusing time series data on 85 industrial sectors, which allows us todistinguish between aggregate and sector specific effects in wagedetermination. Industry wages respond mainly to economy wide labourmarket conditions and to a much lesser extent to sector specificproductivity gains. The size of the insider effect has not remainedstable through the sample period. The estimated equations show a strongtransitory effect of unemployment on wages, which is in accordancewith the non--stationarity of the Spanish unemployment rate. Thishysteresis effect seems well accounted for by the sharp rise in theproportion of long term unemployment.

The persistence of abnormal returns at industry and firm levels

The present paper proposes a model for the persistence of abnormal returnsboth at firm and industry levels, when longitudinal data for the profitsof firms classiffied as industries are available. The model produces a two-way variance decomposition of abnormal returns: (a) at firm versus industrylevels, and (b) for permanent versus transitory components. This variancedecomposition supplies information on the relative importance of thefundamental components of abnormal returns that have been discussed in theliterature. The model is applied to a Spanish sample of firms, obtainingresults such as: (a) there are significant and permanent differences betweenprofit rates both at industry and firm levels; (b) variation of abnormal returnsat firm level is greater than at industry level; and (c) firm and industry levelsdo not differ significantly regarding rates of convergence of abnormal returns.