Research Scientist Productivity and Firm Size: Evidence from Panel Data on Investors

It has long been recognized that worker wages and possibly productivity are higher in large firms. Moreover, at least since Schumpeter (1942) economists have been interested in the relative efficiency of large firms in the research and development enterprise. This paper uses longitudinal worker-firm-matched data to examine the relationship between the productivity of workers specifically engaged in innovation and firm size in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries. In both industries, we find that inventors' productivity increases with firm size. This result holds across different specifications and even after controlling for inventors' experience, education, the quality of other inventors in the firm, and other firm characteristics. We find evidence in the pharmaceutical industry that this is partly accounted for by differences between how large and small firms organize R&D activities.Patents; Innovation; Labor productivity; Research; Firm size

The Influence of University Research on Industrial Innovation

We use U.S. patent records to examine the role of research personnel as a pathway for the diffusion of ideas from university to industry. Appearing on a patent assigned to a university is evidence that an inventor has been exposed to university research, either directly as a university researcher or through some form of collaboration with university researchers. Having an advanced degree is another indicator of an inventor's exposure to university research. We find a steady increase in industry's use of inventors with university research experience over the period 1985-97, economy wide and in the pharmaceutical and semiconductor industries in particular. We interpret this as evidence of growth in the influence of university research on industrial innovation. Moreover, during this period we find that firms with large research operations in both industries, and young and highly capitalized firms in the pharmaceutical industry, are disproportionately active in the diffusion of ideas from the university sector. Finally, we find that the patents of firms that employ inventors with university research experience are more likely to cite university patents as prior art, suggesting that this experience better enables firms to tap academic research.

International Knowledge Flows: Evidence from an Inventor-Firm Matched Data Set

We describe the construction of a panel data set from the U.S. patent data that contains measures of inventors' life-cycle R&D productivity--patents and patent citations. We match the data set to information on the U.S. pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms for whom they work. In this paper we use these data to examine the role of research personnel as a pathway for the diffusion of ideas from foreign countries to U.S. innovators. In particular, we find in recent years an increase in the extent that U.S. innovating firms collaborate with or employ researchers with foreign experience. This increase appears to work primarily through an increase in U.S. firms' employment of foreign-residing researchers; the fraction of research-active U.S. residents with foreign research experience appears to be falling, suggesting that U.S. pharmaceutical and semiconductor firms are increasingly locating operations in foreign countries to employ such researchers, as opposed to such researchers immigrating to the U.S. to work. In addition, we investigate which U.S. firms conducting R&D build upon innovations originating abroad. We find that employing or collaborating with researchers who have research experience abroad seems to facilitate the use of output of non-U.S. R&D. We also find that in the semiconductor industry smaller and older firms, and in the pharmaceutical industry, younger firms are more likely to access foreign R&D output.

Implications of Constraints on Mass Parameters in the Higgs Sector of the Nonlinear Supersymmetric SU(5) Model

The Higgs sector of the minimal nonlinear supersymmetric SU(5) model contains three mass parameters. Although these mass parameters are essentially free at the electroweak scale, they might have particular values if they evolve from a particular constraints at the GUT scale through the RG equations. By assuming a number of simple constraints on these mass parameters at the GUT scale, we obtain their values at the electroweak scale through the RG equations in order to investigate the phenomenological implications. Some of them are found to be consistent with the present experimental data.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figure

An integrated urban systems model with GIS

The purpose of the research is to develop an integrated urban systems model, which will assist in formulating a better land use-transportation policy by simulating the relationships between land use patterns and travel behavior, integrated with geographic information systems (GISs). In order to make an integrated land use-transportation model possible with the assistance of GISs technologies, the following four sub-systems have been developed: (1) an effective traffic analysis zone generation system; (2) an iterative land use and transportation modeling system; (3) efficient interfaces between GIS and land use, and GIS and transportation models; and (4) a user-friendly graphic user interface (GUI) system. By integrating these sub-systems, a variety of alternative land use-transportation policies can be evaluated through the modification of input parameters in each simulation. Eventually, the developed model using a GIS will assist in formulating an effective land use policy by obtaining robust simulation results for both land use-transportation planners and decision makers. The model has been applied to the Urbana-Champaign area as well as to the Seoul region in Korea for a demonstration of the workings of the model.

You can't always sketch what you want: Understanding Sensemaking in Visual Query Systems

Visual query systems (VQSs) empower users to interactively search for line charts with desired visual patterns, typically specified using intuitive sketch-based interfaces. Despite decades of past work on VQSs, these efforts have not translated to adoption in practice, possibly because VQSs are largely evaluated in unrealistic lab-based settings. To remedy this gap in adoption, we collaborated with experts from three diverse domains---astronomy, genetics, and material science---via a year-long user-centered design process to develop a VQS that supports their workflow and analytical needs, and evaluate how VQSs can be used in practice. Our study results reveal that ad-hoc sketch-only querying is not as commonly used as prior work suggests, since analysts are often unable to precisely express their patterns of interest. In addition, we characterize three essential sensemaking processes supported by our enhanced VQS. We discover that participants employ all three processes, but in different proportions, depending on the analytical needs in each domain. Our findings suggest that all three sensemaking processes must be integrated in order to make future VQSs useful for a wide range of analytical inquiries.Comment: Accepted for presentation at IEEE VAST 2019, to be held October 20-25 in Vancouver, Canada. Paper will also be published in a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG) IEEE VIS (InfoVis/VAST/SciVis) 2019 ACM 2012 CCS - Human-centered computing, Visualization, Visualization design and evaluation method

Ideological transmission in extremist contexts : towards a framework of how ideas are shared

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, under Grant ES/N009614/1 (Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats) with funding from the UK intelligence agencies and participating universities.Despite their centrality in academic and policy debates about radicalization and political violence, ideologies have been conceived narrowly, as cognitive, top-down, coherent and systematic. In general, those who have used the concept of ideology have failed to draw on ideological theory or on recent insights about its practice and embodiment, or location in space and time. Our interest is less in the content of ideology than in how it is shared by those for whom it matters. We offer an interpretive framework, based on six key questions about ideological transmission: What ideas, beliefs, and values are shared, how and why, by whom, and in which spatial and temporary contexts? Following a discussion about the methodological pros and cons of the framework, it is tested on a series of interviews with members of Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese religious group responsible for the Tokyo subway attack in 1995. We assess the strengths and limitations of the framework for analysing the various dimensions of ideological transmission before considering what it adds to our understanding of the relationship between extreme beliefs and violent behaviour.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Eccomi pronto : implementation of a Socio-Emotional Development curriculum in a South Korean elementary school

‘Eccomi Pronto’ (EP), an elementary school socio-emotional learning curriculum that was originally developed and evaluated in Italy was translated in Korean and implemented and evaluated in 4th grade classrooms of a primary school in South Korea. Qualitative data from teachers indicated that EP improved the self-reflection and selfdirection of students, resulted in pedagogically useful insights into the psychological functioning of students, and enhanced the quality of teacher-student interaction. However, statistically significant changes in students’ engaged, academic behavior (as measured by an 8-item survey) were not noted. Teachers reported that the core of the EP curriculum was appropriate for the South Korean educational context. Teachers also recommended modifications in the follow-up learning activities to make these activities more consistent with South Korean education practices.peer-reviewe