COUNTERFACTUALS AND THE ANALYSIS OF NECESSITY *

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/73782/1/j.1520-8583.2006.00108.x.pd

Outsourcing and structural change: shifting firm and sectoral boundaries

The paper aims at investigating the structural change implications of outsourcing. In trying to bridge the organizational/industrial and the sectoral/structural analysis of outsourcing, it discusses the rational and the methodological pros and cons of a “battery” of outsourcing measurements for structural change analysis. Their functioning is then illustrated through a concise application of them to the OECD area over the ’80s and the early ’90s. A combined used of them emerges as recommendable in checking for the role of outsourcing with respect to that of other structural change determinants

The role of public funding in nanotechnology scientific production: Where Canada stands in comparison to the United States

This paper presents cross-country comparisons between Canada and the United States in terms of the impact of public grants and scientific collaborations on subsequent nanotechnology-related publications. In this study we present the varying involvement of academic researchers and government funding to capture the influence of funded research in order to help government agencies evaluate their efficiency in financing nanotechnology research. We analyze the measures of quantity and quality of research output using time-related econometric models and compare the results between nanotechnology scientists in Canada and the United States. The results reveal that both research grants and the position of researchers in co-publication networks have a positive influence on scientific output. Our findings demonstrate that research funding yields a significantly positive linear impact in Canada and a positive non-linear impact in the United States on the number of papers and in terms of the number of citations we observe a positive impact only in the US. Our research shows that the position of scientists in past scientific networks plays an important role in the quantity and quality of papers published by nanotechnology scientists