Patents, International Technology Transfer and Industrial Dependence in 19th Century Spain.

This paper will attempt to reflect on the processes of international technology transfer at the beginning of European industrialization. During this period, when the achievement and the spread of technical innovations were vital to the acceleration of economic growth, the more underdeveloped countries experienced an increase in technological dependency on the leading countries. In some of them, the transfer of foreign technical information was more important than that generated by the nation itself, which —in spite of the cost increase of implanting foreign innovations, given the scant integration of international equipment markets— supposed a reduction of the degree of uncertainty associated with all processes of technological changes. The principal objective of the following pages is to analyse in detail the Spanish case, a country in obvious economic decline at the end of the 18th century and well below the average for Europe for most of the 19th century. This well-known delay translated into an external technological dependence in several economic sectors, which left its mark on the industrial protection system. Technological information which contains patent applications will be taken as a valid indicator —although only partial— of the direction and structure of the innovation processes in the Spanish economy. Upon careful study of the origin of patented inventions, it can be ascertained, among other things, the degree of dependence upon external technology; which countries played an essential role in the transfer of technology to Spain; and which economic sectors depended more on foreign technology.Technology Transfer; Patents; Spanish Economic History; Technological Change

The Spanish Patent System. Origins, Characteristics and Evolution

The object of this study is to use documentation on patents as a partial technology indicator, and, above all, as an investment indicator in new technologies in order to analyze the formation, evolution and characterization of the Spanish technological system during the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. From our point of view, ceteris paribus, the decision to patent is based on the intuitive expectation of profits with the new technology –which is influenced both by economic growth itself and by marketing possibilities, as well as by institutional questions, such as the real possibility of enforcing the patent monopoly– and the cost of obtaining the monopoly -in monetary and institutional terms (the existence of required exams or the necessity of implementation, etc.). In general, as occurs in other types of capital investments, success is determined by multiple circumstances, which does not invalidate the possibility of studying the intensity and direction of investment activity. To accomplish that, we will attempt to a) characterize and analyze the Spanish institutional environment related to industrial property to measure the degree to which it supported innovative activity; b) explain the evolution of registries throughout the 19th century and discover the degree of foreign presence in the system; c) analyze the patents solicited by residents in Spanish territory to see whether their geographic distribution over time is related to the formation and integration of the national market; d) study the presence of firms in the system and what socio-professional activities the applicants were engaged in, which could help determine the degree of complexity of technology in Spain; e) describe how the investment processes in technologies were distributed within the economic structure of the country to discover in which sectors innovative activity was concentrated and if it coincided with what we know about the Spanish industrialization process; and finally, f) study the obligatory exploitation of patents and the duration of monopolies, to attempt to uncover data on the real effectiveness of the system in inducing innovation and the forces which brought this about.Patents; Intellectual Property Rights; Spanish Innovation System; Technological Change; Spanish Economic History

Why Did Corporations Patent in Spain? Some Historical Inquiries

In this paper we will explore how international corporations used the Spanish patent system in the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in order to discover what the actual effects of its apparent weakness were. The origins and evolution of corporate patenting in Spain, the effects of compulsory working clauses, the management of assignments, the various strategies followed by the firms, and the effects of patents on technology transfer to the Spanish economy will be clarified. The conclusions yields understanding on real patent management in the long-term by analyzing the strategies of Brown Boveri and Babcock Wilcox corporations in Spain.Patents of introduction; National innovation system; Spain; Technology transfer.

The impact of immigration on American cities: an introduction to the issues

In "The Impact of Immigration on American Cities: An Introduction to the Issues," Albert Saiz discusses immigration's impact on a receiving country's labor and housing markets, fiscal systems, and social interactions.Immigrants

Democracy to the road: the political economy of potholes

Are dictatorships more prone to build and maintain roads? This paper identifies a puzzling fact: countries that are more democratic tend to have roads in worse conditions than less democratic countries. Using lagged values of a democracy index to instrument for democracy in 1980 yields higher estimates of the magnitude of the association between democracy and bad roads. Instruments based on climate, population, and education yield similar results. The evidence points to a negative causal relationship from democracy to road quality. The author also finds that changes to a more democratic government are associated with slower growth of the road network. The author advances four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that can explain the results and find support for one of them: dictatorships prefer a better highway network ready for external and internal military intervention.Roads

Three-dimensional modeling of single stranded DNA hairpins for aptamer-based biosensors.

Aptamers consist of short oligonucleotides that bind specific targets. They provide advantages over antibodies, including robustness, low cost, and reusability. Their chemical structure allows the insertion of reporter molecules and surface-binding agents in specific locations, which have been recently exploited for the development of aptamer-based biosensors and direct detection strategies. Mainstream use of these devices, however, still requires significant improvements in optimization for consistency and reproducibility. DNA aptamers are more stable than their RNA counterparts for biomedical applications but have the disadvantage of lacking the wide array of computational tools for RNA structural prediction. Here, we present the first approach to predict from sequence the three-dimensional structures of single stranded (ss) DNA required for aptamer applications, focusing explicitly on ssDNA hairpins. The approach consists of a pipeline that integrates sequentially building ssDNA secondary structure from sequence, constructing equivalent 3D ssRNA models, transforming the 3D ssRNA models into ssDNA 3D structures, and refining the resulting ssDNA 3D structures. Through this pipeline, our approach faithfully predicts the representative structures available in the Nucleic Acid Database and Protein Data Bank databases. Our results, thus, open up a much-needed avenue for integrating DNA in the computational analysis and design of aptamer-based biosensors

Accurate prediction of gene expression by integration of DNA sequence statistics with detailed modeling of transcription regulation

Gene regulation involves a hierarchy of events that extend from specific protein-DNA interactions to the combinatorial assembly of nucleoprotein complexes. The effects of DNA sequence on these processes have typically been studied based either on its quantitative connection with single-domain binding free energies or on empirical rules that combine different DNA motifs to predict gene expression trends on a genomic scale. The middle-point approach that quantitatively bridges these two extremes, however, remains largely unexplored. Here, we provide an integrated approach to accurately predict gene expression from statistical sequence information in combination with detailed biophysical modeling of transcription regulation by multidomain binding on multiple DNA sites. For the regulation of the prototypical lac operon, this approach predicts within 0.3-fold accuracy transcriptional activity over a 10,000-fold range from DNA sequence statistics for different intracellular conditions.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Urban decline and housing reinvestment: the role of construction costs and the supply side

Negative demand shocks have afflicted many American cities in the 20th century and are the main explanation for their decaying housing markets. But what is the role of housing supply? Rational entrepreneurs should not invest in new buildings and renovation when home values are below replacement cost. Households with an investment motive should behave similarly. Empirically, the authors find that construction costs are not very sensitive to building activity but do vary with local income, unionization rates in the construction sector, the level of local regulation, and region. They also document that the variance in building costs generates substantial variance in renovation expenditures across cities. Owner-occupied homes with market values below replacement costs spend about 50 percent less on renovation than similar homes with market values above construction costs. The authors also report on the distribution of the ratio of house value-to-construction cost across markets. The distribution is relatively flat in a number of declining cities, especially older manufacturing areas. In these places, a relatively modest 10 percent decline in replacement costs would find between 7-15 percent of the local housing stock moving from being valued below cost to above cost. Even though modest declines in construction costs are unlikely to change basic urban trends, the authors' results suggest they can be an important factor in determining whether various neighborhoods in declining cities will experience any significant reinvestment. In this respect, declining cities truly cannot afford to be expensive cities in terms of replacement costs: urban scholars and policy makers should begin to pay more attention to the cost side of cities.Urban economics ; Construction industry ; Supply-side economics

The returns to speaking a second language

Does speaking a foreign language have an impact on earnings? The authors use a variety of empirical strategies to address this issue for a representative sample of U.S. college graduates. OLS regressions with a complete set of controls to minimize concerns about omitted variable biases, propensity score methods, and panel data techniques all lead to similar conclusions. The hourly earnings of those who speak a foreign language are more than 2 percent higher than the earnings of those who do not. The authors obtain higher and more imprecise point estimates using state high school graduation and college entry and graduation requirements as instrumental variables.

Immigration and the neighborhood

What impact does immigration have on neighborhood dynamics? Within metropolitan areas, the authors find that housing values have grown relatively more slowly in neighborhoods of immigrant settlement. They propose three nonexclusive explanations: changes in housing quality, reverse causality, or the hypothesis that natives find immigrant neighbors relatively less attractive (native flight). To instrument for the actual number of new immigrants, the authors deploy a geographic diffusion model that predicts the number of new immigrants in a neighborhood using lagged densities of the foreign-born in surrounding neighborhoods. Subject to the validity of their instruments, the evidence is consistent with a causal interpretation of an impact from growing immigration density to native flight and relatively slower housing price appreciation. Further evidence indicates that these results may be driven more by the demand for residential segregation based on race and education than by foreignness per se.Immigrants