Productivity in services twenty years on. A review of conceptual and measurement issues and a way forward

Griliches' seminal contribution on "Output measurement in the service sectors" (1992) is now more than twenty years old. The aim of this paper is to review and systematise the scholarship that has been produced since, to identify any step forward in the conceptualisation of service output, the measurement of service productivity and the account of technical change in affecting productivity in services that might have occurred. An agenda for both innovation and service scholars is proposed

The 2019 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This fourteenth Survey on Industrial R&D investment trends is based on 131 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2017 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The participating EU firms have a total of €64. billion of R&D investments, 31% of the total R&D investments by EU firms in the 2017 EU R&D Scoreboard, and expect R&D investment to increase by 4.6% per year in 2018 and 2019.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

The 2017 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This twelfth Survey on Industrial R&D investment trends is based on 151 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2015 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. These 151 companies are responsible for €53.9 billion R&D investment, constituting almost one fourth of the total R&D investment by the 1000 EU Scoreboard companies.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

Prediction of a novel type-I antiferromagnetic Weyl semimetal

Topological materials have been a main focus of studies in the past decade due to their protected properties that can be exploited for the fabrication of new devices. Among them, Weyl semimetals are a class of topological semimetals with non-trivial linear band crossing close to the Fermi level. The existence of such crossings requires the breaking of either time-reversal or inversion symmetry and is responsible for the exotic physical properties. In this work we identify the full-Heusler compound InMnTi$_2$, as a promising, easy to synthesize, $T$- and $I$-breaking Weyl semimetal. This material exhibits several features that are comparatively more intriguing with respect to other known Weyl semimetals: the distance between two neighboring nodes is large enough to observe a wide range of linear dispersions in the bands, and only one kind of such node's pairs is present in the Brillouin zone. We also show the presence of Fermi arcs stable across a wide range of chemical potentials. Finally, the lack of contributions from trivial points to the low-energy properties makes the materials a promising candidate for practical devices

The 2018 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This thirteenth Survey on Industrial R&D investment trends is based on 148 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2017 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. The participating EU firms have a total of €69.2 billion of R&D investments, 36% of the total R&D investments by EU firms in the 2017 EU R&D Scoreboard, and expect R&D investment to increase by 5.4% per year in 2018 and 2019.JRC.B.3-Territorial Developmen

The 2015 EU Survey on Industrial R&D Investment Trends

This tenth survey on industrial R&D investment trends is based on 162 responses of mainly large firms from a subsample of the 1000 EU-based companies in the 2014 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scoreboard. These 162 companies are responsible for €60 billion R&D investment, constituting around 36% of the total R&D investment by the 1000 EU Scoreboard companies. The responding companies expect to increase their nominal R&D investment by 3.0 % per year during 2015–17. This is a third less than the expected increases of last year’s survey (4.2 %) and slightly higher than the results of the one the year before (2.6 %). The responding companies carry out one-fourth of their R&D outside the EU. The responding companies’ expectations for R&D investment for the next three years show the ongoing participation of European companies in the global economy. While maintaining the focus of their R&D investment in the EU, they reap opportunities for growth in emerging economies. Three out of four of the responding EU-based companies consider their home country among the three most attractive locations for R&D. Regarding non-EU countries, the United States, China and India are seen as the most attractive locations outside the home country.JRC.J.2-Knowledge for Growt

Force on a large sphere immersed in an expanded water-fluidized bed over a wide range of voidage values

The presence of large objects immersed in a fluidized bed has been long studied in order to verify to what extent can the analogy with a buoyant body in a liquid represent the object-to-suspension interaction (1). One of the most useful information resulting from such study is the effective drag force exerted on the object and how it is related to the suspension properties, particularly with respect to the expansion degree. Implications are found also in the formulation of drag force expressions for homogeneous polydisperse systems. In the present work an experimental series of tests has been conducted on a 10 cm diameter, 2 m height fluidization column using glass beads in two sizes (300 and 600 m) as solid and water as fluidizing medium. A 2.1 cm diameter sphere held by a balance was immersed and kept fixed at the center of the cross-section but free to move axially. Measurements of the hydrodynamic force were carried out at voidage values as high as 0.94, allowing the full range of bed expansion conditions to be covered. Different vertical positions of the large particle was also considered. Results for the drag force indicate that while at low and intermediate expansions the analogy with buoyancy works quite well, at higher voidage values, starting from about = 0.8, the trend departs and additional force contributions are required to explain, though partially, the observed deviations. REFERENCES R. Di Felice, P.U. Foscolo, L.G. Gibilaro. The experimental determination of the interaction force on spheres submerged in liquid fluidized beds. Chem. Eng. Process. 25: 27-34, 1989

The gravity of foreign news coverage in the EU: does the euro matter?

This work investigates the systemic factors behind cross-country variability in the transnational media coverage of foreign news in the EU in 2010. Using a large dataset on the transnational coverage of news by 148 EU national media, the paper maps the network of EU transnational citations and performs a quantitative assessment of their systemic determinants via the estimation of a gravity model of news. Nine empirical hypotheses are tested. Size and economic development of the target (source) country are positively (negatively) associated with the probability of coverage. Historical, linguistic and economic ties increase this probability. The evidence on the effect of the countries’ participation in the currency union is weak: once the historical levels of trade integration and the effects of the sovereign debt crisis are accounted for, there is no robust evidence of a higher integration of the media spheres within the euro area

Do funding sources complement or substitute? Examining the impact of cancer research publications

Academic research often draws on multiple funding sources. This paper investigates whether complementarity or substitutability emerges when different types of funding are used. Scholars have examined this phenomenon at the university and scientist levels, but not at the publication level. This gap is significant since acknowledgement sections in scientific papers indicate publications are often supported by multiple funding sources. To address this gap, we examine the extent to which different funding types are jointly used in publications, and to what extent certain combinations of funding are associated with higher academic impact (citation count). We focus on three types of funding accessed by UK-based researchers: national, international, and industry. The analysis builds on data extracted from all UK cancer-related publications in 2011, thus providing a 10-year citation window. Findings indicate that, although there is complementarity between national and international funding in terms of their co-occurrence (where these are acknowledged in the same publication), when we evaluate funding complementarity in relation to academic impact (we employ the supermodularity framework), we found no evidence of such a relationship. Rather, our results suggest substitutability between national and international funding. We also observe substitutability between international and industry funding