Who Do European Parties Represent? How Western European Parties Represent the Policy Preferences of Opinion Leaders

Several recent studies explore how American politicians represent the policy views of subconstituencies within the electorate. We extend this perspective to 12 West European democracies over the period 1973- 2002 to examine how mainstream parties responded to electoral subconstituencies. We find that parties were highly responsive to the views of opinion leaders, i.e., citizens who regularly engaged in political discussions and persuasion; by contrast we find no evidence that other types of voters substantively influenced parties policy programmes. We also identify significant time lags in mainstream parties responses to opinion leaders policy beliefs. Our findings have interesting implications for subconstituency representation, for understanding parties internal policymaking processes, and for spatial modeling. © 2009 Copyright Southern Political Science Association

Industrial R&D Laboratories: Windows on Black Boxes?

This paper provides an overview of the survey-based literature on industrial Research and Development (R&D) laboratories, beginning with the work of Edwin Mansfield. Topics covered include R&D projects, new products, and new processes; the appropriability of intellectual property; the limits of the firm in R&D; and spillovers of knowledge from other firms and universities into the laboratories. I discuss the value of collecting information from industrial R&D managers, who participate in a wide range of R&D decisions and are the natural best source of information on these decisions. I also emphasize gaps in our knowledge concerning R&D from past studies, such as the private and social returns to R&D, the nature of firms' R&D portfolios, and other topics. The paper closes with a discussion of the benefits from building a national database on R&D laboratories that could be shared among researchers and that could take this area of research to a new and higher level of achievement.

Endogenous R&D Spillovers and Industrial Research Productivity

This paper explores the implications of a simple model of learning and innovation by firms. In this model R&D spillovers are partly determined by firms, rather than by the given economic environment. According to this approach the full effect of spillovers on research productivity of firms exceeds the structural effect because it includes an active learning' response of firms to new information. Furthermore, effective spillovers grow faster or slower than potential spillovers, depending on the returns to scale of production processes for learning and invention. The empirical work is based on a sample of R&D laboratories in the chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and transportation equipment industries. I estimate negative binomial regressions for the number of patents as a function of academic and industrial spillover pools, learning expenditures and internal research expenditures. The findings are consistent with the view that learning expenditures transmit the effect of spillovers. I also perform tobit, ordered probit and grouped probit estimation of learning effort. I find that learning effort increases in response to industrial and academic R&D spillovers. Lastly, academic spillovers appear to have a more pervasive effect on R&D than do industrial spillovers. Overall these results suggest a sequence of events underlying learning and innovation, with learning responding to opportunities, innovation responding to learning and own R&D, and a stream of innovations leading to the accumulation of new product introductions that ultimately are reflected in the value of enterprise.

Learning, Internal Research, and Spillovers Evidence from a Sample of R&D Laboratories

This paper presents new evidence on the practice of industrial Research and Development (R&D), especially the allocation between learning and internal research, and the role of outside knowledge, as represented by R&D spillovers, in reshaping this allocation. The evidence describes the sources of outside knowledge, portrays the flow of that knowledge into firms, and interprets the channels by which outside knowledge influences R&D. The empirical work is based on a sample of 220 R&D laboratories owned by 115 firms in the U.S. chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and motor vehicles industries. The findings are consistent with the view that universities and firms generate technological opportunities in R&D laboratories. In addition to partnerships that define rather strict channels of opportunity, the paper uncovers broader effects of R&D spillovers. The results also suggest that academic spillovers drive learning about universities, and that industrial spillovers drive learning about industry. In this way externally derived opportunities reshape the rate and direction of R&D. Overall the findings paint an image of practitioners of industrial R&D reaching aggressively for opportunities, rather than waiting for opportunities to come to them.

Free associative composition: Practice led research into composition techniques that help enable free association.

The original compositions presented in this portfolio are the product of practice led research into developing and implementing composition techniques that enable free association. This com-mentary outlines the different approaches I have taken and the reasoning behind them

Should merger policy be changed? An antitrust perspective

Consolidation and merger of corporations ; Antitrust law

Scientific Teams and Institution Collaborations: Evidence from U.S. Universities, 1981-1999

This paper explores recent trends in the size of scientific teams and in institutional collaborations. The data derive from 2.4 million scientific papers written in 110 leading U.S. research universities over the period 1981-1999. We measure team size by the number of authors on a scientific paper. Using this measure we find that team size increases by 50 percent over the 19-year period. We supplement team size with measures of domestic and foreign institutional collaborations, which capture the geographic dispersion of team workers. The time series evidence suggests that the trend towards larger and more dispersed teams accelerates at the start of the 1990s. This acceleration suggests a sudden decline in the cost of collaboration, perhaps due to improvements in telecommunications. Using a panel of top university departments we find that private universities and departments whose scientists have earned prestigious awards participate in larger teams, as do departments that have larger amounts of federal funding. Placement of former graduate students is a key determinant of institutional collaborations, especially collaborations with firms and foreign scientific institutions. Finally, the evidence indicates that scientific influence increases with team size and institutional collaborations. Since increasing team size implies an increase in the division of labor, these results suggest that scientific productivity increases with the scientific division of labor.

Transient shear banding in the nematic dumbbell model of liquid crystalline polymers

In the shear flow of liquid crystalline polymers (LCPs) the nematic director orientation can align with the flow direction for some materials, but continuously tumble in others. The nematic dumbbell (ND) model was originally developed to describe the rheology of flow-aligning semi-flexible LCPs, and flow-aligning LCPs are the focus in this paper. In the shear flow of monodomain LCPs it is usually assumed that the spatial distribution of the velocity is uniform. This is in contrast to polymer solutions, where highly non-uniform spatial velocity profiles have been observed in experiments. We analyse the ND model, with an additional gradient term in the constitutive model, using a linear stability analysis. We investigate the separate cases of constant applied shear stress, and constant applied shear rate. We find that the ND model has a transient flow instability to the formation of a spatially inhomogeneous flow velocity for certain starting orientations of the director. We calculate the spatially resolved flow profile in both constant applied stress and constant applied shear rate in start up from rest, using a model with one spatial dimension to illustrate the flow behaviour of the fluid. For low shear rates flow reversal can be seen as the director realigns with the flow direction, whereas for high shear rates the director reorientation occurs simultaneously across the gap. Experimentally, this inhomogeneous flow is predicted to be observed in flow reversal experiments in LCPs.Comment: 16 pages, 15 figure