Building Export Capabilities by promoting Inter-Firm Linkages: Ireland’s Industrial Policy Revisited.

For the period 1972-2003 in Ireland we document a persistent decline in traditional import competing and an expansion in exporting plants, within each sector. Yet, the focus of this paper is to explore the vertical linkages between exporting plants and the increasing presence of de novo non-exporting plants within industries during this period. Based the capabilities approach of Sutton (2007) and the creative destruction model of Aghion and Howitt (1992) we find evidence that forward dominated backward vertical linkages, in that innovation in de novo non-exporting plants was a key determinant of export entry, growth and survival within all sectors, while evidence of backward linkages are harder to find.Manufacturing, Structural Change, Trade liberalisation, Export Development and Inter-Firm Vertical Backward and Forward Linkages.

The evolution of organizational niches : U.S. automobile manufacturers, 1885-1981.

Although the niche figures prominently in contemporary theories of organization, analysts often fail to tie micro processes within the niche to long-term changes in the broader environment. In this paper, we advance arguments about the relationship between an organization's niche and evolution in the structure of its organizational population over time. We focus on the technological niche and processes of positioning and crowding among firms in the niche space, relating them to the level of concentration among all firms in the market. Building on previous empirical studies in organizational ecology, we study the evolution of concentration in the American automobile industry from 1885 to 1981 and estimate models of the hazard of exit of individual producers from the market. The findings show that niche and concentration interact in complex ways, yielding a more unified depiction of organizational evolution than typically described or reported

A DYNAMIC MODEL OF VERTICAL INTEGRATION FOR THE AMERICAN PULP AND PAPER INDUSTRY

The focus of this research is to learn about the factors that influence the decision of a manufacturing firm to vertically integrate into the production of its input. The American paper industry has a feature that makes it particularly suitable for this purpose: over the years paper mills of apparently similar characteristics have made different decisions with regards to their integration status. This work draws on the insight that there must be some unobserved mill characteristic that drives the decision process for a mill. Mills´ choices of whether to exit the industry, and with regards to their integration status when they choose to stay in operation, depend on their productivity. This generates selection and simultaneity biases in a reduced form estimation. In order to deal with these issues, I propose a dynamic model in the spirit of Olley and Pakes (1996). This approach not only takes care of the estimation biases, but also allows me to learn about the unobserved characteristics of the firms in my data, and to use them to determine which firms vertically integrate and which firms do not. In addition, the model I propose allows me to learn about how vertical integration affects productivity and mill´s entry and exit decisions.Vertical Integration

The Entrepreneur's Choice of Location: Evidence from the Life Sciences

Why do biotech firms cluster? New and established firms in biotech clusters are said to capitalize on knowledge spillovers, labor-market pooling, and other externalities. Some have even argued that such spillovers are so strong that the cluster itself, rather than the individual, is the locus of entrepreneurship. Such arguments, however, do not resolve the mechanism by which clusters might contribute to the establishment of new firms. This paper proposes a conceptual framework for analyzing the locational choices of entrepreneurial firms in the life-sciences industry. Building on both the cluster literature and the literature on entrepreneurship, we develop hypotheses about how cluster characteristics, the entrepreneurs personal characteristics, and characteristics of the business environment affect the entrepreneurs decision to establish a new firm. We argue that a key factor in the location decision is the relative mobility of the appropriate resources. Our main hypothesis is that specialized labor is less mobile than capital and other resources and that it is the base from which entrepreneurs are ultimately created. If so, new firms will emerge in areas characterized by an existing concentration of specialized labor. This labor pool may be spawned by universities and incumbent small and larger biotech (or other high-technology) companies. An alternative explanation is that entrepreneurs establish new ventures outside the cluster, then move them to the cluster to take advantage of local knowledge and other resources. Or a potential entrepreneur could conceive a business plan, then relocate to an existing cluster before founding a firm. We explain how survey data can be used to sort through these explanations.entrepreneurship, biotechnology, clusters, knowledge spillovers, agglomeration economies, Industrial Organization, L26, L65, O18, O32,

Industry Life Cycle and the Evolution of an Industry Network

This paper addresses the problem of the general validity of models of the industry life cycle, which have been proposed to analyse the long-term evolution of many industries, exhibiting a typical pattern of shakeout. We study a case of non shake-out in the commercial jet aero-engine industry, marked by a small number of entry events distributed over 40 years of industry evolution, by no exits and by a resulting slowly increasing number of firms. We argue that the vertical structure of the industry, as represented by the network of vertical relations between aero-engine suppliers and aircraft manufacturers, "regulated" the process of entry and exit and posed the conditions for a non shakeout to take place.industry life cycle; entry, exit; network; vertical relations

Polluting emissions standards and clean technology trajectories under competitive selection and supply chain pressure

Based on a model of industrial dynamics, this paper examines the impact of polluting emissions standards on trajectories of clean technologies implemented by firms subject to competitive selection and supply chain pressure. The model incorporates a few stylised facts on the relationships between environmental regulation, innovation and diffusion. The main objective is to highlight the forces influencing the long term dynamics of an industry faced with evolving emissions standards in a ‘history-friendly’ way. The paper gives guidance to the conditions of dynamic efficiency of emissions standards taking into account the coevolution of technology, user requirements and market structure. We show that emission standards not only play a significant role in orienting research and innovation activities of supplier firms, but they are also likely to support the diffusion of environmental innovation in the supply chain. In some cases, emission standards lead to prevent both a situation of lock-in on the supply side and a situation of behavioural inertia on the user side. Standards may thus lead to preserve a certain form of technological and behavioural diversity. Based on the computer simulations, it will be shown that the efficiency of standards depends on the nature of performance standards (process or product), on the market structure and on the timing of intervention.environmental innovation; industrial dynamics; environmental supply chain pressure; emission standards

The long term evolution of vertically-related industries

The paper develops the argument that the long-term structural evolution of an industry depends on the evolution of a vertically-related, downstream industry. We analyse two pairs of vertically-related industries, the jet and turboprop aircraft and engine industries, since the first introduction of the jet and turboprop technologies to 1998. The paper shows that the evolutionary dynamics of the downstream industry, in terms of number of firms and products, entry, exit and concentration, is transmitted to the upstream industry via the structure of the network of vertical exchange relations. We identify two network configurations, partitioned and hierarchical, and show that they are responsible for sharply different transmission effects. An econometric analysis is carried out to demonstrate this difference in the turboprop and jet markets.vertically-related industries; network; industrial concentration; entry; exit.