Knowledge Externalities, Agglomeration Economies, and Employment Growth in Dutch Cities

This paper extends the work of Glaeser et al.(1992) by looking at effects of agglomeration economies on employment growth in Dutch city-industries and in very small (postal) zip code-industries in the Dutch province of South-Holland. At both levels of geographic detail, findings are broadly consistent with results from the earlier study in that employment growth is enhanced by industrial diversity and local competition, but retarded by industrial specialization.Also, a novel feature of the analysis presented here is that we examine the extent to which agglomeration economies in one location affect employment growth in other locations.economic growth;employment;urban areas

The United States Postal Service: A Government Corporation Requiring Changes: Past, Present, Future

This project determines the cost of maintaining the postal service currently. It explores whether this cost is justifiable on the grounds of binding the Nation together or if these costs are impairing the overall value of such service to the people . Whether these costs are viewed as reasons for continued postal deficits or seen as the need for radical changes in the structure and operation of the postal service (even to the point of creating a private corporation from it) will determine the future course of action in regard to it

Endogenous R&D Spillovers and Industrial Research Productivity

This paper explores the implications of a simple model of learning and innovation by firms. In this model R&D spillovers are partly determined by firms, rather than by the given economic environment. According to this approach the full effect of spillovers on research productivity of firms exceeds the structural effect because it includes an active learning' response of firms to new information. Furthermore, effective spillovers grow faster or slower than potential spillovers, depending on the returns to scale of production processes for learning and invention. The empirical work is based on a sample of R&D laboratories in the chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and transportation equipment industries. I estimate negative binomial regressions for the number of patents as a function of academic and industrial spillover pools, learning expenditures and internal research expenditures. The findings are consistent with the view that learning expenditures transmit the effect of spillovers. I also perform tobit, ordered probit and grouped probit estimation of learning effort. I find that learning effort increases in response to industrial and academic R&D spillovers. Lastly, academic spillovers appear to have a more pervasive effect on R&D than do industrial spillovers. Overall these results suggest a sequence of events underlying learning and innovation, with learning responding to opportunities, innovation responding to learning and own R&D, and a stream of innovations leading to the accumulation of new product introductions that ultimately are reflected in the value of enterprise.

Learning, Internal Research, and Spillovers Evidence from a Sample of R&D Laboratories

This paper presents new evidence on the practice of industrial Research and Development (R&D), especially the allocation between learning and internal research, and the role of outside knowledge, as represented by R&D spillovers, in reshaping this allocation. The evidence describes the sources of outside knowledge, portrays the flow of that knowledge into firms, and interprets the channels by which outside knowledge influences R&D. The empirical work is based on a sample of 220 R&D laboratories owned by 115 firms in the U.S. chemicals, machinery, electrical equipment, and motor vehicles industries. The findings are consistent with the view that universities and firms generate technological opportunities in R&D laboratories. In addition to partnerships that define rather strict channels of opportunity, the paper uncovers broader effects of R&D spillovers. The results also suggest that academic spillovers drive learning about universities, and that industrial spillovers drive learning about industry. In this way externally derived opportunities reshape the rate and direction of R&D. Overall the findings paint an image of practitioners of industrial R&D reaching aggressively for opportunities, rather than waiting for opportunities to come to them.

Communications

The communications sector of an economy comprises a range of technologies, physical media, and institutions/rules that facilitate the storage of information through means other than a society\u27s oral tradition and the transmission of that information over distances beyond the normal reach of human conversation. This chapter provides data on the historical evolution of a disparate range of industries and institutions contributing to the movement and storage of information in the United States over the past two centuries. These include the U.S. Postal Service, the newspaper industry, book publishing, the telegraph, wired and cellular telephone service, radio and television, and the Internet

Mismatch unemployment and the geography of job search

Could we significantly reduce U.S. unemployment by helping job seekers move closer to jobs? Using data from the leading employment board CareerBuilder.com, we show that, indeed, workers dislike applying to distant jobs: job seekers are 35% less likely to apply to a job 10 miles away from their ZIP code of residence. However, because job seekers are close enough to vacancies on average, this distaste for distance is fairly inconsequential: our search and matching model predicts that relocating job seekers to minimize unemployment would decrease unemployment by only 5.3%. Geographic mismatch is thus a minor driver of aggregate unemployment

The Influence of Federal Laboratory R&D on Industrial Research

Over the past 60 years the United States has created the world's largest system of government laboratories. The impact of the laboratories on the private economy has been little studied though their research accounts for 14% of total U.S. R&D, more than the R&D of all colleges and universities combined. In this paper we study the influence of federal laboratory R&D on industrial research using a sample of industrial laboratories. In head-to-head comparisons with alternative measures, we find that Cooperative Research and Development Agreements or CRADAs, are the primary channel by which federal laboratories increase the patenting and R&D of industrial laboratories. With a CRADA industrial laboratories patent more, spend more on company-financed R&D and spend more of their own money on federal laboratories. Without a CRADA patenting stays about the same and only federally funded R&D increases, mostly because of direct subsidies by government. These results are consistent with the literature on endogenous R&D spillovers, which emphasizes that knowledge spills over when recipients work at making it spill over. CRADAs are legal agreements between federal laboratories and firms to work together on joint research. They are backed by real budgets and accompanied by cost sharing that could bind the parties together in joint research. Moreover, the CRADA instrument is the main form of such agreements. Thus, both in theory and in fact CRADAs may be more beneficial to firms than other public- private interactions, precisely because of the mutual effort that they require of firms and government laboratories.

Ethnicity, Language, and Workplace Segregation: Evidence from a New Matched Employer-Employee Data Set

We describe the construction and assessment of a new matched employer-employee data set (the Decennial Employer-Employee Dataset, or DEED) that we have undertaken as a part of a broad research agenda to study segregation in the U.S. labor market. In this paper we examine the role of segregation by Hispanic ethnicity and language proficiency, contributing new, previously unavailable descriptive information on segregation along these lines, and evidence on the wage premia or penalties associated with this segregation. The DEED is much larger and more representative across regional and industry dimensions than previous matched data sets for the United States, and improvements along both of these dimensions are essential to isolating the importance of segregation by language and ethnicity in the workplace. Our empirical results reveal considerable segregation by Hispanic ethnicity and by English language proficiency. We find that Hispanic workers, but not white workers, suffer wage penalties from employment in a workplace with a large share of Hispanic workers, and even more so a large share of Hispanic workers with poor English language proficiency. In addition, we find that segregation of Hispanic workers among other Hispanics with similar English language proficiency does not reduce the penalties associated with poor own language skills.