An analysis of the efficiency of public spending and national policies in the area of R&D

Improving the quality of public finances is a major challenge for European policy makers. The economic crisis has increased budgetary pressures and accentuated the tension between the need to sustain public spending aimed at raising the EU growth potential and the increased scarcity of public resources. Rising the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending in growth-enhancing areas such as education, R&D and innovation has become, therefore, even more important. This paper reviews the innovation performance of the different EU Member States and provides estimates of the relative efficiency of their R&D spending. In doing so, it aims at moving the policy discussion from mere volume-based policy targets towards a better assessment of the quality and effects of public R&D spending. The main contribution of this paper is therefore the identification of both (1) a suitable methodology for the evaluation of efficiency levels across Member States and (2) structural and policy determinants which may contribute to raise efficiency levels of R&D spending across countries and over time. Results indicate that there exist large cross-country differences in terms of measured efficiency, which is an indication that in many Member States there remains a significant potential for further improvement. Currently, there appears to be a divide in efficiency levels between old and new Member States. However, there is some evidence that the new Member States are catching up. The estimated efficiency scores indicate that all EU Member States have improved their efficiency levels over time. There is evidence that the efficiency of R&D spending is higher in countries with a strong knowledge base which, in turn, implies that increases in R&D spending do not necessarily lead to reductions in efficiency levels. Other factors that positively affect efficiency levels include the high-tech specialisation of the economy, the level of investment in education, the employment share in science and technology, and the degree of protection of intellectual property rights. Finally, a R&D tax treatment more oriented towards fiscal incentives rather than direct subsidies appears to have a positive effect on the efficiency level of R&D spending across EU Member States. This work is based on both a quantitative measurement of efficiency levels and a qualitative analysis of the policy instruments used in the Member States to promote R&D efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency scores are calculated by means of the Stochastic Frontier Analysis for a set of input and output indicators in order to overcome the limitations associated with each individual indicator. A complementary survey of national governments highlights some further policy instruments that could contribute to increase the efficiency of R&D and innovation policies, in particular at the national level. The results of the survey argue in favour of adopting a systemic approach to R&D, education and innovation policies, including three main elements: (i) adapting educational programmes and the research infrastructure to the needs of science and industry; (ii) making a sustained commitment to knowledge investment by adopting medium-term funding programmes; and (iii) evaluating existing R&D programmes in order to determine which policy tools are the most effective and in which areas R&D investments offer the highest returns. More recently, Member States have introduced R&D spending measures specifically targeted to deal with the consequences of the economic crisis. A closer look at these measures reveals that Member States consider direct grants and offers of tax relief as appropriate instruments to counteract the effects of the crisis. It should be clear that such policy measures should be tailored to the specific needs and strengths of every Member State.Public Finance, Efficiency, R&D spending, patents, innovation policy.

An analysis of the efficiency of public spending and national policies in the area of R&D

Improving the quality of public finances is a major challenge for European policy makers. The economic crisis has increased budgetary pressures and accentuated the tension between the need to sustain public spending aimed at raising the EU growth potential and the increased scarcity of public resources. Rising the efficiency and effectiveness of public spending in growth-enhancing areas such as education, R&D and innovation has become, therefore, even more important. This paper reviews the innovation performance of the different EU Member States and provides estimates of the relative efficiency of their R&D spending. In doing so, it aims at moving the policy discussion from mere volume-based policy targets towards a better assessment of the quality and effects of public R&D spending. The main contribution of this paper is therefore the identification of both (1) a suitable methodology for the evaluation of efficiency levels across Member States and (2) structural and policy determinants which may contribute to raise efficiency levels of R&D spending across countries and over time. Results indicate that there exist large cross-country differences in terms of measured efficiency, which is an indication that in many Member States there remains a significant potential for further improvement. Currently, there appears to be a divide in efficiency levels between old and new Member States. However, there is some evidence that the new Member States are catching up. The estimated efficiency scores indicate that all EU Member States have improved their efficiency levels over time. There is evidence that the efficiency of R&D spending is higher in countries with a strong knowledge base which, in turn, implies that increases in R&D spending do not necessarily lead to reductions in efficiency levels. Other factors that positively affect efficiency levels include the high-tech specialisation of the economy, the level of investment in education, the employment share in science and technology, and the degree of protection of intellectual property rights. Finally, a R&D tax treatment more oriented towards fiscal incentives rather than direct subsidies appears to have a positive effect on the efficiency level of R&D spending across EU Member States. This work is based on both a quantitative measurement of efficiency levels and a qualitative analysis of the policy instruments used in the Member States to promote R&D efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency scores are calculated by means of the Stochastic Frontier Analysis for a set of input and output indicators in order to overcome the limitations associated with each individual indicator. A complementary survey of national governments highlights some further policy instruments that could contribute to increase the efficiency of R&D and innovation policies, in particular at the national level. The results of the survey argue in favour of adopting a systemic approach to R&D, education and innovation policies, including three main elements: (i) adapting educational programmes and the research infrastructure to the needs of science and industry; (ii) making a sustained commitment to knowledge investment by adopting medium-term funding programmes; and (iii) evaluating existing R&D programmes in order to determine which policy tools are the most effective and in which areas R&D investments offer the highest returns. More recently, Member States have introduced R&D spending measures specifically targeted to deal with the consequences of the economic crisis. A closer look at these measures reveals that Member States consider direct grants and offers of tax relief as appropriate instruments to counteract the effects of the crisis. It should be clear that such policy measures should be tailored to the specific needs and strengths of every Member State

How Do Disks Survive Mergers?

We develop a physical model for how galactic disks survive and/or are destroyed in interactions. Based on dynamical arguments, we show gas primarily loses angular momentum to internal torques in a merger. Gas within some characteristic radius (a function of the orbital parameters, mass ratio, and gas fraction of the merging galaxies), will quickly lose angular momentum to the stars sharing the perturbed disk, fall to the center and be consumed in a starburst. A similar analysis predicts where violent relaxation of the stellar disks is efficient. Our model allows us to predict the stellar and gas content that will survive to re-form a disk in the remnant, versus being violently relaxed or contributing to a starburst. We test this in hydrodynamic simulations and find good agreement as a function of mass ratio, orbital parameters, and gas fraction, in simulations spanning a wide range in these properties and others, including different prescriptions for gas physics and feedback. In an immediate sense, the amount of disk that re-forms can be understood in terms of well-understood gravitational physics, independent of details of ISM gas physics or feedback. This allows us to explicitly quantify the requirements for such feedback to (indirectly) enable disk survival, by changing the pre-merger gas content and distribution. The efficiency of disk destruction is a strong function of gas content: we show how and why sufficiently gas-rich major mergers can, under general conditions, yield systems with small bulges (B/T<0.2). We provide prescriptions for inclusion of our results in semi-analytic models.Comment: 32 pages, 16 figures, accepted to ApJ (minor revisions to match accepted version

The Effects of Gas on Morphological Transformation in Mergers: Implications for Bulge and Disk Demographics

Transformation of disks into spheroids via mergers is a well-accepted element of galaxy formation models. However, recent simulations have shown that bulge formation is suppressed in increasingly gas-rich mergers. We investigate the global implications of these results in a cosmological framework, using independent approaches: empirical halo-occupation models (where galaxies are populated in halos according to observations) and semi-analytic models. In both, ignoring the effects of gas in mergers leads to the over-production of spheroids: low and intermediate-mass galaxies are predicted to be bulge-dominated (B/T~0.5 at <10^10 M_sun), with almost no bulgeless systems), even if they have avoided major mergers. Including the different physical behavior of gas in mergers immediately leads to a dramatic change: bulge formation is suppressed in low-mass galaxies, observed to be gas-rich (giving B/T~0.1 at <10^10 M_sun, with a number of bulgeless galaxies in good agreement with observations). Simulations and analytic models which neglect the similarity-breaking behavior of gas have difficulty reproducing the strong observed morphology-mass relation. However, the observed dependence of gas fractions on mass, combined with suppression of bulge formation in gas-rich mergers, naturally leads to the observed trends. Discrepancies between observations and models that ignore the role of gas increase with redshift; in models that treat gas properly, galaxies are predicted to be less bulge-dominated at high redshifts, in agreement with the observations. We discuss implications for the global bulge mass density and future observational tests.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures, accepted to MNRAS (matched published version). A routine to return the galaxy merger rates discussed here is available at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~phopkins/Site/mergercalc.htm

Dissipation and Extra Light in Galactic Nuclei: II. 'Cusp' Ellipticals

We study the origin and properties of 'extra' or 'excess' central light in the surface brightness profiles of cusp or power-law ellipticals. Dissipational mergers give rise to two-component profiles: an outer profile established by violent relaxation acting on stars present in the progenitors prior to the final merger, and an inner stellar population comprising the extra light, formed in a compact starburst. Combining a large set of hydrodynamical simulations with data that span a broad range of profiles and masses, we show that this picture is borne out -- cusp ellipticals are indeed 'extra light' ellipticals -- and examine how the properties of this component scale with global galaxy properties. We show how to robustly separate the 'extra' light, and demonstrate that observed cusps are reliable tracers of the degree of dissipation in the spheroid-forming merger. We show that the typical degree of dissipation is a strong function of stellar mass, tracing observed disk gas fractions at each mass. We demonstrate a correlation between extra light content and effective radius at fixed mass: systems with more dissipation are more compact. The outer shape of the light profile does not depend on mass, with a mean outer Sersic index ~2.5. We explore how this relates to shapes, kinematics, and stellar population gradients. Simulations with the gas content needed to match observed profiles also reproduce observed age, metallicity, and color gradients, and we show how these can be used as tracers of the degree of dissipation in spheroid formation.Comment: 40 pages, 32 figures, accepted to ApJ (revised to match accepted version

How Do Massive Black Holes Get Their Gas?

We use multi-scale SPH simulations to follow the inflow of gas from galactic scales to <0.1pc, where the gas begins to resemble a traditional Keplerian accretion disk. The key ingredients are gas, stars, black holes (BHs), self-gravity, star formation, and stellar feedback. We use ~100 simulations to survey a large parameter space of galaxy properties and subgrid models for the ISM physics. We generate initial conditions for our simulations of galactic nuclei (<~300pc) using galaxy scale simulations, including both major mergers and isolated bar-(un)stable disk galaxies. For sufficiently gas-rich, disk-dominated systems, a series of gravitational instabilities generates large accretion rates of up to 1-10 M_sun/yr onto the BH (at <<0.1pc); sufficient to fuel the most luminous quasars. The BH accretion rate is highly time variable, given fixed conditions at ~kpc. At >~10pc, our simulations resemble the 'bars within bars' model, but the gas exhibits diverse morphologies, including spirals, rings, clumps, and bars; their duty cycle is modest, complicating attempts to correlate BH accretion with nuclear morphology. At ~1-10pc, the gravitational potential becomes dominated by the BH and bar-like modes are no longer present. However, the gas becomes unstable to a standing, eccentric disk or a single-armed spiral mode (m=1), driving the gas to sub-pc scales. Proper treatment of this mode requires including star formation and the self-gravity of both the stars and gas. We predict correlations between BHAR and SFR at different galactic nuclei: nuclear SF is more tightly coupled to AGN activity, but correlations exist at all scales.Comment: 20 figures, 36 pages. Accepted to MNRAS (expanded to match accepted version). Movies of the simulations described here can be found at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~phopkins/Site/Movies_zoom.htm

Selenoprotein gene nomenclature

The human genome contains 25 genes coding for selenocysteine-containing proteins (selenoproteins). These proteins are involved in a variety of functions, most notably redox homeostasis. Selenoprotein enzymes with known functions are designated according to these functions: TXNRD1, TXNRD2, and TXNRD3 (thioredoxin reductases), GPX1, GPX2, GPX3, GPX4 and GPX6 (glutathione peroxidases), DIO1, DIO2, and DIO3 (iodothyronine deiodinases), MSRB1 (methionine-R-sulfoxide reductase 1) and SEPHS2 (selenophosphate synthetase 2). Selenoproteins without known functions have traditionally been denoted by SEL or SEP symbols. However, these symbols are sometimes ambiguous and conflict with the approved nomenclature for several other genes. Therefore, there is a need to implement a rational and coherent nomenclature system for selenoprotein-encoding genes. Our solution is to use the root symbol SELENO followed by a letter. This nomenclature applies to SELENOF (selenoprotein F, the 15 kDa selenoprotein, SEP15), SELENOH (selenoprotein H, SELH, C11orf31), SELENOI (selenoprotein I, SELI, EPT1), SELENOK (selenoprotein K, SELK), SELENOM (selenoprotein M, SELM), SELENON (selenoprotein N, SEPN1, SELN), SELENOO (selenoprotein O, SELO), SELENOP (selenoprotein P, SeP, SEPP1, SELP), SELENOS (selenoprotein S, SELS, SEPS1, VIMP), SELENOT (selenoprotein T, SELT), SELENOV (selenoprotein V, SELV) and SELENOW (selenoprotein W, SELW, SEPW1). This system, approved by the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee, also resolves conflicting, missing and ambiguous designations for selenoprotein genes and is applicable to selenoproteins across vertebrates

Compact High-Redshift Galaxies Are the Cores of the Most Massive Present-Day Spheroids

Observations suggest that effective radii of high-z massive spheroids are as much as a factor ~6 smaller than low-z galaxies of comparable mass. Given the apparent absence of low-z counterparts, this has often been interpreted as indicating that the high density, compact red galaxies must be 'puffed up' by some mechanism. We compare the ensemble of high-z observations with large samples of well-observed low-z ellipticals. At the same physical radii, the stellar surface mass densities of low and high-z systems are comparable. Moreover, the abundance of high surface density material at low redshift is comparable to or larger than that observed at z>1-2, consistent with the continuous buildup of spheroids over this time. The entire population of compact, high-z red galaxies may be the progenitors of the high-density cores of present-day ellipticals, with no need for a decrease in stellar density from z=2 to z=0. The primary difference between low and high-z systems is thus the observed low-density material at large radii in low-z spheroids (rather than the high-density material in high-z spheroids). Such low-density material may either (1) assemble at z2. Mock observations of low-z massive systems show that the high-z observations do not yet probe sufficiently low surface brightness material to detect the low surface density 'wings' (if present). Thus, if the high-z galaxies resemble the most massive systems today, their inferred effective radii could be under-estimated by factors ~2-4. This difference arises because massive systems at low redshift are not well-fit by single Sersic profiles. We discuss implications of our results for physical models of galaxy evolution.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, accepted to MNRAS (revised to match published version