338 research outputs found
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
Centreless governance for the management of a global R&D process: Public-Private Partnerships and Plant-Genetic Resource Management
Public-private partnership is one new model of centreless or networked governance that has emerged in recent years. This article examines the development and use of partnerships in the management and funding of public pulse breeding programs. The paper evaluates the theory of innovation and knowledge management and uses case study and social network analysis to examine the nature and strength of the international public pulse breeding system and analyzes in detail the three major national public pulse breeding systems in Australia, the US and Canada. Australia appears to have the most developed system of public-private partnerships, centred on the Grains Research Development Corporation and, CLIMA. Canada lacks a centralized national body such as the GRDC, but possesses a regional system centred on a university research centre (the Crop Development Centre) and a hybrid organization (the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers). The US is remarkable for the lack of any significant public-private partnerships in public pulse breeding
Collaboration and the Generation of New Knowledge in Networked Innovation Systems: A Bibliometric Analysis
AbstractCanola, a high-value, export-oriented agricultural commodity, was developed in Canada over the course of 40 years in public institutions, driven by imported technology and imported research scientists. The evolution of canola R&D closely mirrors the evolution of the Triple Helix Models of innovation. Through the application of longitudinal citation analysis, using five-year intervals, publications from Canadian public institutions involved in canola R&D have been analyzed. In the most recent five- year interval, the relative citation rates of public sector research increased by 60% compared to the global average. A unique fixed-effect negative binomial regression model is used to demonstrate the critical relationship between the institutional arrangement that governs collaboration and the production of knowledge that underscores technological innovation
Fit for purpose? A cross-sectional study to evaluate the acceptability and usability of HeadUp, a novel neck support collar for neurological neck weakness
The HeadUp collar (previously known as the Sheffield Support Snood) provides support for neck weakness caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and has shown to be superior to alternative options in a small cohort of patients from one single center. Here we report the assessment of the HeadUp collar in a larger cohort of patients, exploring the use in other neurological conditions and expanding to other centers across the UK and Ireland. An interventional cross-sectional study design was implemented to investigate the usability and acceptability of the HeadUp collar. A total of 139 patients were recruited for the study, 117 patients had a diagnosis of ALS and 22 patients presented with neck weakness due to other neurological conditions. Participants were assessed at baseline, fitted a HeadUp collar and followed-up one month later. The performance of the HeadUp collar was rated favorably compared to previously worn collars in terms of the ability to eat, drink and swallow. Findings suggest that the collar also permitted a more acceptable range of head movements whilst maintaining a good level of support. We conclude that the HeadUp collar is a suitable option for patients with neck weakness due to ALS and other neurological conditions
Exact Hypersurface-Homogeneous Solutions in Cosmology and Astrophysics
A framework is introduced which explains the existence and similarities of
most exact solutions of the Einstein equations with a wide range of sources for
the class of hypersurface-homogeneous spacetimes which admit a Hamiltonian
formulation. This class includes the spatially homogeneous cosmological models
and the astrophysically interesting static spherically symmetric models as well
as the stationary cylindrically symmetric models. The framework involves
methods for finding and exploiting hidden symmetries and invariant submanifolds
of the Hamiltonian formulation of the field equations. It unifies, simplifies
and extends most known work on hypersurface-homogeneous exact solutions. It is
shown that the same framework is also relevant to gravitational theories with a
similar structure, like Brans-Dicke or higher-dimensional theories.Comment: 41 pages, REVTEX/LaTeX 2.09 file (don't use LaTeX2e !!!) Accepted for
publication in Phys. Rev.
Search for lepton-flavor violation at HERA
A search for lepton-flavor-violating interactions and has been performed with the ZEUS detector using the entire HERA I
data sample, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 130 pb^{-1}. The data
were taken at center-of-mass energies, , of 300 and 318 GeV. No
evidence of lepton-flavor violation was found, and constraints were derived on
leptoquarks (LQs) that could mediate such interactions. For LQ masses below
, limits were set on , where
is the coupling of the LQ to an electron and a
first-generation quark , and is the branching ratio of
the LQ to the final-state lepton ( or ) and a quark . For
LQ masses much larger than , limits were set on the four-fermion
interaction term for LQs that couple to an electron and a quark
and to a lepton and a quark , where and are
quark generation indices. Some of the limits are also applicable to
lepton-flavor-violating processes mediated by squarks in -Parity-violating
supersymmetric models. In some cases, especially when a higher-generation quark
is involved and for the process , the ZEUS limits are the most
stringent to date.Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures, Accepted by EPJC. References and 1 figure (Fig.
6) adde
Multijet production in neutral current deep inelastic scattering at HERA and determination of alpha_s
Multijet production rates in neutral current deep inelastic scattering have
been measured in the range of exchanged boson virtualities 10 < Q2 < 5000 GeV2.
The data were taken at the ep collider HERA with centre-of-mass energy sqrt(s)
= 318 GeV using the ZEUS detector and correspond to an integrated luminosity of
82.2 pb-1. Jets were identified in the Breit frame using the k_T cluster
algorithm in the longitudinally invariant inclusive mode. Measurements of
differential dijet and trijet cross sections are presented as functions of jet
transverse energy E_{T,B}{jet}, pseudorapidity eta_{LAB}{jet} and Q2 with
E_{T,B}{jet} > 5 GeV and -1 < eta_{LAB}{jet} < 2.5. Next-to-leading-order QCD
calculations describe the data well. The value of the strong coupling constant
alpha_s(M_Z), determined from the ratio of the trijet to dijet cross sections,
is alpha_s(M_Z) = 0.1179 pm 0.0013(stat.) {+0.0028}_{-0.0046}(exp.)
{+0.0064}_{-0.0046}(th.)Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure
Measurement of (anti)deuteron and (anti)proton production in DIS at HERA
The first observation of (anti)deuterons in deep inelastic scattering at HERA
has been made with the ZEUS detector at a centre-of-mass energy of 300--318 GeV
using an integrated luminosity of 120 pb-1. The measurement was performed in
the central rapidity region for transverse momentum per unit of mass in the
range 0.3<p_T/M<0.7. The particle rates have been extracted and interpreted in
terms of the coalescence model. The (anti)deuteron production yield is smaller
than the (anti)proton yield by approximately three orders of magnitude,
consistent with the world measurements.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables, submitted to Nucl. Phys.
Measurement of beauty production in deep inelastic scattering at HERA
The beauty production cross section for deep inelastic scattering events with
at least one hard jet in the Breit frame together with a muon has been
measured, for photon virtualities Q^2 > 2 GeV^2, with the ZEUS detector at HERA
using integrated luminosity of 72 pb^-1. The total visible cross section is
sigma_b-bbar (ep -> e jet mu X) = 40.9 +- 5.7 (stat.) +6.0 -4.4 (syst.) pb. The
next-to-leading order QCD prediction lies about 2.5 standard deviations below
the data. The differential cross sections are in general consistent with the
NLO QCD predictions; however at low values of Q^2, Bjorken x, and muon
transverse momentum, and high values of jet transverse energy and muon
pseudorapidity, the prediction is about two standard deviations below the data.Comment: 18 pages, 4 figure
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