Competition and Innovation: Evidence from Financial Services

In this paper we seek to contribute to the literature on competition and innovation by focusing on individual firms within the U.S. banking industry in the period 1984-2004. We measure innovation by estimating technology gaps and find evidence of an inverted-U relationship between competition and the technology gaps in banking. This finding is robust over several different specifications and is consistent with theoretical and empirical work by Aghion, Bloom, Blundell, Griffith, and Howitt (2005b). The optimal amount of innovation requires a slightly positive mark up. Also, we find that the U.S. banking industry as a whole has consolidated beyond this optimal innovation level and that state-level interstate banking deregulation has lowered innovation.competition, innovation, stochastic frontier analysis, technology gap ratio, banking

Spillovers

Interstate and international spillovers from public agricultural research and development (R&D) investments account for a significant share of agricultural productivitygrowth. Hence, spillovers of agricultural R&D results across geopolitical boundaries have implications for measures of research impacts on productivity, and the implied rates of return to research, as well as for state, national and international agricultural research policy. In studies of aggregate state or national agricultural productivity, interstate or international R&D spillovers might account for half or more of the total measured productivitygrowth. Similarly, results from studies of particular crop technologies indicate that international technology spillovers, and multinational impacts of technologies from international centres, were important elements in the total picture of agricultural development in the 20th Century. Within countries, funding institutions have been developed to address spatial spillovers of agricultural technologies. The fact that corresponding institutions have not been developed for international spillovers has contributed to a global underinvestment in certain types of agricultural research.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the Severity of War

Drawing on Clausewitz's classical theory, we argue that the emergence of mass nationalism following the French Revolution profoundly altered the nature of the units constituting the interstate system, thereby transforming the conduct of interstate warfare. To validate these assertions—and thus to test Clausewitz—we rely on quantitative evidence at the macro level, with a particular focus on the global distribution of interstate war sizes, measured in terms of battle deaths, over the past five centuries. Drawing on extreme value theory, we demonstrate that temporal discontinuities in the shapes of the tails of such distributions can be used to draw inferences about the nature of the mechanisms underlying the bloodiest events in world history. This approach allows us to show that the interstate system experienced a fundamental shift in the mechanisms underlying the production of war sizes: a shift that can be dated to the years 1770-1810, and that resulted in a systematic increase in war severity. These same tools also allow us to rule out a number of alternative explanations for this shift (including changes in population sizes and changes in weapons technology), while providing evidence for a specific account of war severity rooted in the mobilizational capacities of state

Federal Regulation of Non-Nuclear Hazardous Wastes: A Research Bibliography

The identification of nonlinear systems by the minimization of a predictionerror criterion suffers from the problem of local minima. To get a reliableestimate we need good initial values for the parameters. In this paper wediscuss the class of nonlinear Wiener models, consisting of a linear dynamicsystem followed by a static nonlinearity. By selecting a parameterizationwhere the parameters enter linearly in the error, we can obtain an initialestimate of the model via linear regression. An example shows that thisapproach may be preferential to trying to estimate the linear system directlyform input-output data, if the input is not Gaussian. We discuss some of theusers choices and how the linear regression initial estimate can be convertedto a desired model structure to use in the prediction error criterionminimization. The method is also applied to experimental data

Mississippi River Water Quality and the Clean Water Act: Progress, Challenges, and Opportunities

Makes recommendations for how to coordinate water quality monitoring efforts among the ten states through which the Mississippi River runs. Discusses the Clean Water Act's successes and failures in reducing pollution