Copyright and endogenous market structure: a glimpse from the journal-publishing market

This article explores the journal publishing industry in order to shed light on the overall economic consequences of copyright in markets. Since the rationale for copyright is among others to promise some market power to the holder of the successful copyrighted item, it also provides incentives to preserve and extend market power. A regular trait of copyright industries is high concentration and the creation of large catalogues of copyrights in the hands of incumbents. This outcome can be observed as the aggregation of rights and is one of the pivotal strategies for obtaining or extending market power, consistently with findings in other cases. Journal publishing is no different in this respect from other copyright industries, and in the last decade has experienced a similar trajectory, leading to a highly concentrated industry in which a handful of large firms increasingly control a substantial part of the market. It also provides a clear example of the effect of copyright dynamics on market structure, suggesting that a different attitude should be taken in lawmaking and law enforcement.copyright and market power, endogenous market structure, journal-publishing industry

Providing Foster Care for Young Adults: Early Implementation of California's Fostering Connections Act

This report examines the planning process for implementing California's Fostering Connections to Success Act, as well as the new law's early implementation. It is based on data collected from in-depth interviews with key informants who played a critical role in passage of the law, in implementation planning, or in early implementation at the county and state level and from focus groups with young people who stood to benefit directly from the legislation. Although extended foster care is likely to look different in different states, California's experience offers many lessons from which other states might learn

Nothing But Net: American Workers and the Information Economy

Explores the implications of the information economy for American workers, including worker experience with computers, perceptions about their future in the information economy, and the role of government in how technology affects jobs and prosperity in the information age

International Capital Flows and Credit Market Imperfections: a Tale of Two Frictions

The financial crisis of 2007-08 has underscored the importance of adverse selection in financial markets. This friction has been mostly neglected by macroeconomic models of financial frictions, however, which have focused almost exclusively on the effects of limited pledgeability. In this paper, we fill this gap by developing a standard growth model with adverse selection. Our main results are that, by fostering unproductive investment, adverse selection: (i) leads to an increase in the economy's equilibrium interest rate, and (ii) it generates a negative wedge between the marginal return to investment and the equilibrium interest rate. Under financial integration, we show how this translates into excessive capital inflows and endogenous cycles. We also explore how these results change when limited pledgeability is added to the model. We conclude that both frictions complement one another and argue that limited pledgeability exacerbates the effects of adverse selection.Limited Pledgeability; Adverse Selection; International Capital Flows; Credit Market Imperfections

Slipping Behind: Low-Income Los Angeles Households Drift Further From the Financial Mainstream

Surveys trends among low-income households without bank accounts, barriers to opening or maintaining accounts, continued use of alternative financial services, and impact of the city's Bank on LA program to promote banking. Makes policy recommendations

Rewarding Innovation: Improving Federal Tax Support for Business R&D in Canada

Business innovation is viewed by many as a solution to Canada’s ailing productivity performance. One of the more troubling aspects of Canada’s innovation track record is that businesses spend relatively little on research and development (R&D) despite having access to some of the world’s most generous R&D tax incentives. Canada’s low levels of business R&D have called into question the effectiveness of Canada’s generous R&D tax incentives, particularly the flagship federal Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program. A deeper analysis, however, reveals that tax incentives are effective in stimulating more R&D – that is, Canada would have lower levels of business R&D in the absence of these inducements. Instead, the root cause of Canada’s business R&D deficit appears to stem from structural aspects of the economy and, more importantly, a lack of demand-related pressure to pursue innovation.Fiscal and Tax Competitiveness, Canada, research and development (R&D) incentives, Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) program

A Rule Set for the Future

This volume, Digital Young, Innovation, and the Unexpected, identifies core issues concerning how young people's use of digital media may lead to various innovations and unexpected outcomes. The essays collected here examine how youth can function as drivers for technological change while simultaneously recognizing that technologies are embedded in larger social systems, including the family, schools, commercial culture, and peer groups. A broad range of topics are taken up, including issues of access and equity; of media panics and cultural anxieties; of citizenship, consumerism, and labor; of policy, privacy, and IP; of new modes of media literacy and learning; and of shifting notions of the public/private divide. The introduction also details six maxims to guide future research and inquiry in the field of digital media and learning. These maxims are "Remember History," "Consider Context," "Make the Future (Hands-on)," "Broaden Participation," "Foster Literacies," and "Learn to Toggle." They form a kind of flexible rule set for investigations into the innovative uses and unexpected outcomes now emerging or soon anticipated from young people's engagements with digital media

Incorporated citizens: multinational high-tech companies and the BoP

In this article, I examine HP’s e-Inclusion program and its implementation in India to show how the high-tech industry’s efforts to alleviate poverty profitably are guided by C. K. Prahalad’s ideas about the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP), and are framed as digital corporate citizenship activities. While the BoP highlights the importance of new markets for high-tech companies, the discourse of digital corporate citizenship creates an enabling environment in which transnational high-tech companies can gain political access to new consumers at the BoP. The resulting digital corporate citizenship/BoP nexus leads to the extension of governments’ bureaucratic reach and the formation of electronic entrepreneurs