Of Intellectual Property, Open Source and Innovation: Trends, and Some Opportunities for Italy

This paper offers some reflections on the institutions for the governance of knowledge as an economic asset, and its management in firms. It then relies on a research based on a survey of a large number of patents (PatVal-EU) to discuss specific features of the invention system in Italy. The paper ends by suggesting that Italy is an interesting position to launch new policies that balance intellectual property rights and open source. It also flags the possibility of an Inventor Compensation Act like in Germany, which can motivate employees to launch new ideas and raise the Italian innovation rate.open source, patents, intellectual property rights, innovation.

An Equilibrium Model of Lumpy Housing Investment

We formulate and solve a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and lumpy housing adjustment at the household level. We use the model to ask a simple question: how does the microeconomic lumpiness of housing adjustment affect the equilibrium dynamic properties of aggregate consumption and investment? Our main conclusion is that lumpiness matters: in particular, lumpiness in housing adjustment (1) reduces the volatility of both housing and business investment; (2) increases the volatility of aggregate consumption; (3) increases the correlation of housing investment with business investment and with GDP. We also show that lumpiness of investment activity at the household level has small but significant aggregate implications, in contrast with the literature that shows that the aggregate effects of lumpy investment at the firm level are negligible.

Equilibrium Wage Dispersion: Monopsony or Sorting?

Why are similar workers paid differently? I review and compare two lines of research that have recently witnessed great progress in addressing “unexplained” wage inequality: (i) worker unobserved heterogeneity in, and sorting by, human capital; (ii) firms’ monopsony power in labor markets characterized by job search frictions. Both lines share a view of wage differentials as an equilibrium phenomenon. Despite their profound conceptual and technical differences, they remain natural competitors in this investigation. Unlike other hypotheses, they provide natural and unifying explanations for job and worker flows, unemployment duration and incidence, job-to-job quits, and the shape of the wage distribution.

You Cannot Fix What You Cannot Find! An Investigation of Fault Localization Bias in Benchmarking Automated Program Repair Systems

Properly benchmarking Automated Program Repair (APR) systems should contribute to the development and adoption of the research outputs by practitioners. To that end, the research community must ensure that it reaches significant milestones by reliably comparing state-of-the-art tools for a better understanding of their strengths and weaknesses. In this work, we identify and investigate a practical bias caused by the fault localization (FL) step in a repair pipeline. We propose to highlight the different fault localization configurations used in the literature, and their impact on APR systems when applied to the Defects4J benchmark. Then, we explore the performance variations that can be achieved by `tweaking' the FL step. Eventually, we expect to create a new momentum for (1) full disclosure of APR experimental procedures with respect to FL, (2) realistic expectations of repairing bugs in Defects4J, as well as (3) reliable performance comparison among the state-of-the-art APR systems, and against the baseline performance results of our thoroughly assessed kPAR repair tool. Our main findings include: (a) only a subset of Defects4J bugs can be currently localized by commonly-used FL techniques; (b) current practice of comparing state-of-the-art APR systems (i.e., counting the number of fixed bugs) is potentially misleading due to the bias of FL configurations; and (c) APR authors do not properly qualify their performance achievement with respect to the different tuning parameters implemented in APR systems.Comment: Accepted by ICST 201

Recent Developments in Productivity and the Role of Entrepreneurship in Italy: An Industry View

This paper explores the existing interplay between productivity trends across Italian industries, in the decade 1995-2005, and entrepreneurship, highlighting the urgent need for a revival in entrepreneurial capital in some industries. Initially, we consider as a measure of entrepreneurship the birth rates for different industries; this proxy proved to be a significant explanatory variable of a sector’s efficiency. We then attempt to extract a measure of managerial ability directly from the data, considering it as an unobservable and using Bayesian techniques to perform the estimation, which further reinforces the previous results.entrepreneurship, productivity growth, stochastic frontiers, Bayesian analysis, Gibbs sampling.

Stay in Time, Apr. 2014

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/musicanddance_news/1002/thumbnail.jp

Direct and Indirect Complementarity between Workplace Reorganization and New Technology

We link survey and balance sheet data to investigate the extent of complementarity between the introduction of new technology and changes in workplace practices. Across all firms, we find that new technology is complementary with higher work intensity. Similarly, changes in work techniques yield diffuse complementarity gains, particularly in firms undergoing extensive restructuring. Changes in work organization yield, on average, complementarity gains in terms of productivity growth. Substitutability between new technology and specific workplace changes is sometimes found, consistently with the presence of costs associated to learning functions or resistance to changes.workplace practices, ICT investments, complementarity.

Monitoring Italy 2007

management practices; innovation; productivity

Knowledge Flows and Productivity

National and international flows of knowledge are fundamental determinants of technological progress. In this article we review the existing literature on knowledge flows and we propose a method for estimating them, based on patent citations. Citations are links between inventions that reveal a learning process at the technological frontier. We use data for the period 1975-1996 for 147 subnational regions in Europe and North America. We find that geographical distance and technological differences constitute major barriers to knowledge flows. We also show that these flows may have positive, but small, effect on total factor productivity.

New Processes and New Products in Europe and Italy

This article investigates the differences in the mechanisms and strategies conducing to the introduction of new processes and products in Italy and Europe. Three models are proposed in order to identify the different business strategies and innovation inputs associated with new products and new processes. The empirical analysis uses innovation surveys data at the industry level for 8 European countries, with a specific focus on the Italian case. The analysis shows that while the two types of innovation have a strong complementarity, product and process innovations are the results of different innovative inputs and different strategies pursued by firms.product innovation, process innovation, Italian national innovation system.