The potential for urban land reform in Scotland

Scottish land reform has been a focus of concerted campaigning for well over a century. The latest legislative measure, the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003, has made only modest progress and is now under review. Up to now, land reform has been seen primarily as a rural issue and there remains plenty of scope to address the Scottish land question in a rural context. The focus of this paper, however, is on the urgent need for urban land reform, and specifically to tackle those ownership and valuation constraints that keep urban land vacant by impeding its redevelopment for productive use. Drawing on the property rights literature, the paper argues for innovative and radical responses to Scotland’s urban land problems, involving legislation to introduce a ‘Community Right of Sale’ (CRS), ‘Majority Land Assembly’ (MLA) and ‘Urban Partnership Zone’ (UPZs)

Evaporant source for vapor deposition Patent

Spatter proof evaporant source design for use in vacuum deposition of solid thin films on substrate

Vacuum deposition apparatus Patent

Describing apparatus used in vacuum deposition of thin film inductive windings for spacecraft microcircuitr

Industrial R&D Laboratories: Windows on Black Boxes?

This paper provides an overview of the survey-based literature on industrial Research and Development (R&D) laboratories, beginning with the work of Edwin Mansfield. Topics covered include R&D projects, new products, and new processes; the appropriability of intellectual property; the limits of the firm in R&D; and spillovers of knowledge from other firms and universities into the laboratories. I discuss the value of collecting information from industrial R&D managers, who participate in a wide range of R&D decisions and are the natural best source of information on these decisions. I also emphasize gaps in our knowledge concerning R&D from past studies, such as the private and social returns to R&D, the nature of firms' R&D portfolios, and other topics. The paper closes with a discussion of the benefits from building a national database on R&D laboratories that could be shared among researchers and that could take this area of research to a new and higher level of achievement.

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.

Scientific Teams and Institution Collaborations: Evidence from U.S. Universities, 1981-1999

This paper explores recent trends in the size of scientific teams and in institutional collaborations. The data derive from 2.4 million scientific papers written in 110 leading U.S. research universities over the period 1981-1999. We measure team size by the number of authors on a scientific paper. Using this measure we find that team size increases by 50 percent over the 19-year period. We supplement team size with measures of domestic and foreign institutional collaborations, which capture the geographic dispersion of team workers. The time series evidence suggests that the trend towards larger and more dispersed teams accelerates at the start of the 1990s. This acceleration suggests a sudden decline in the cost of collaboration, perhaps due to improvements in telecommunications. Using a panel of top university departments we find that private universities and departments whose scientists have earned prestigious awards participate in larger teams, as do departments that have larger amounts of federal funding. Placement of former graduate students is a key determinant of institutional collaborations, especially collaborations with firms and foreign scientific institutions. Finally, the evidence indicates that scientific influence increases with team size and institutional collaborations. Since increasing team size implies an increase in the division of labor, these results suggest that scientific productivity increases with the scientific division of labor.

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.

The Case for Improving U.S. Computer Science Education

Despite the growing use of computers and software in every facet of our economy, not until recently has computer science education begun to gain traction in American school systems. The current focus on improving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education in the U.S. school system has disregarded differences within STEM fields. Indeed, the most important STEM field for a modern economy is not only one that is not represented by its own initial in "STEM" but also the field with the fewest number of high school students taking its classes and by far has the most room for improvement—computer science