Advertising and the evolution of market structure in the US car industry

This paper focuses on a single simple stylized fact which stands out from the post-war history of the US car industry, namely that industry concentration fell just at the same time as industry advertising expenditures rose sharply. Since both events were almost certainly caused by the entry and market penetration of (largely) foreign owned car producers, this stylized fact raises interesting questions about whether – and if so, how – advertising affects entry. We use a model of consumer switching behaviour to help interpret the facts. The model predicts a simple linear association between market and advertising shares (which we observe fairly clearly at two different levels of aggregation in the data), and provides the basis for arguing that advertising can facilitate entry, but only for finite periods of time

Beyond market failures: the market creating and shaping roles of state investment banks

The paper develops a typological framework of the roles of state investment banks (SIBs) in the economy. The typology identifies four different roles: countercyclical; developmental; venture capitalist; and challenge-led. The paper conceptually elaborates the typology by first providing a historical overview of SIBs, and then discussing how the mainstream “market failure theory” justifies them. It then advances a different conceptualization based on insights from heterodox economics, showing that all roles of SIBs are more about market creating/shaping rather than market-failure fixing. The paper concludes with a proposal of a new agenda for research on SIBs based on our typological framework

Off-equilibrium corrections to energy and conserved charge densities in the relativistic fluid in heavy-ion collisions

Dissipative processes in relativistic fluids are known to be important in the analyses of the hot QCD matter created in high-energy heavy-ion collisions. In this work, I consider dissipative corrections to energy and conserved charge densities, which are conventionally assumed to be vanishing but could be finite. Causal dissipative hydrodynamics is formulated in the presence of those dissipative currents. The relation between hydrodynamic stability and transport coefficients is discussed. I then study their phenomenological consequences on the observables of heavy-ion collisions in numerical simulations. It is shown that particle spectra and elliptic flow can be visibly modified.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures; title changed, references added, conclusions unchange

Industrial policies in Europe: an introduction

As guest editors of this Special Issue of PE/JEP we have selected a small number of rather detailed assessment of contemporary history of domestic industrial policies in the international context. The four papers included in this Special Issue can be seen as three case studies of “sectoral” innovation policies (broad band, wind energy, biotechnology) with a strong emphasis on country institutional features and policy instruments, together with one “horizontal” case of industrial policy in a specific country context (innovative startups in Italy). The heterogeneous theoretical background (industrial organization, evolutionary theory of the firm, economics of innovation, development) provides a somewhat unifying hidden thread of these case studies, without becoming a subject of analysis per se. This approach has been our intentional editorial choice and we are fully aware of its limitations. After very short non-technical summaries of the four papers (Section 1) we try to present a rather synthetic assessment of our personal views (largely shared among us even with partial minor disagreements) about the increasingly hot debate on the nature, limitations and desirable perspectives of industrial policy today. We argue for a non-ideological forward-looking role of governments as active players in helping domestic entrepreneurial resources not only to fully exploit inherited comparative advantages but also to face structural uncertainties and discover own potential competitive advantages in a rapidly changing international context (Section 2)

Photoconductivity and photoluminescence under bias in GaInNAs/GaAs MQW p-i-n structures

Abstract The low temperature photoluminescence under bias (PLb) and the photoconductivity (PC) of a p-i-n GaInNAs/GaAs multiple quantum well sample have been investigated. Under optical excitation with photons of energy greater than the GaAs bandgap, PC and PLb results show a number of step-like increases when the sample is reverse biased. The nature of these steps, which depends upon the temperature, exciting wavelength and intensity and the number of quantum wells (QWs) in the device, is explained in terms of thermionic emission and negative charge accumulation due to the low confinement of holes in GaInNAs QWs. At high temperature, thermal escape from the wells becomes much more dominant and the steps smear out.</jats:p

Chiral Rings, Anomalies and Electric-Magnetic Duality

We study electric-magnetic duality in the chiral ring of a supersymmetric U(N_c) gauge theory with adjoint and fundamental matter, in presence of a general confining phase superpotential for the adjoint and the mesons. We find the magnetic solution corresponding to both the pseudoconfining and higgs electric vacua. By means of the Dijkgraaf-Vafa method, we match the effective glueball superpotentials and show that in some cases duality works exactly offshell. We give also a picture of the analytic structure of the resolvents in the magnetic theory, as we smoothly interpolate between different higgs vacua on the electric side.Comment: 54 pages, harvmac. v2: typos correcte