Cooperation and Competition in a Duopoly R&D Market

In a general setting with uncertainty and spillovers in R&D activity, we consider the incentive to cooperate among firms at any or all of the following three stages. Firms can jointly agree on the level of R&D expenditures, they can set up joint research facilities, and/or they can engage in an information sharing agreements, by which they agree to share any findings with the other firm. We compare expenditures on R&D, profit levels, and welfare levels across the different possible cooperative and competitive setups and offer antitrust implications. Our model differs from previous analyses in three important ways. First, most studies consider only research aimed at lowering production costs, and therefore consider only situations where total profits fall as spillovers increase. We allow for the possibility of product innovation, and define the concepts of offsetting spillovers (falling total profits) and incremental spillovers (when total profits increase as spillovers increase). Second, we consider a wider variety of cooperation possibilities than do most prior studies. Finally, we use far more general functional forms than is usual in the literature.

The Ronkin number of an exponential sum

We give an intrinsic estimate of the number of connected components of the complementary set to the amoeba of an exponential sum with real spectrum improving the result of Forsberg, Passare and Tsikh in the polynomial case and that of Ronkin in the exponential one.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figure

Money Demand in theEuroArea: Do National Differences Matter?

This paper assesses the relevance of national information in estimating the demand for euro-area M3 from three perspectives. First, we check whether national money demands can legitimately be aggregated. Second, we compare time-series and panel methods to estimate aggregate long-run coefficients. Finally, we investigate the differences among national money demands. We find that the hypothesis of perfect aggregation is not rejected. Nevertheless, some estimates of area-wide long-run parameters are sensitive to the method used to combine national information. The main difference among individual countries’ money demands is their interest elasticity.money demand, aggregation, European Central Bank.

Money demand in the euro area: do national differences matter?

This paper assesses the relevance of national information in estimating the demand for euro-area M3 from three perspectives. First, we check whether aggregating national money demands is appropriate. Second, we compare time-series and panel methods to estimate aggregate long-run coefficients. Finally, we investigate the differences among national money demands. We find that the hypothesis of perfect aggregation is not rejected. Nevertheless, some estimates of area-wide long-run parameters are sensitive to the method used to combine national information. We also find that the main difference among individual countriesÂ’ money demands is their interest elasticity, as well as the existence of country-specific structural breaks.money demand, aggregation, European Central Bank

Growth without finance, finance without growth

The international comparative evidence on the nexus between finance and growth is ambiguous, owing to the many difficulties in isolating finance, separating its growth effect from that of the other factors. To overcome this problem, we study the effects of financial development on growth from 1960 to 2010 in one country – Italy. Thus we have the same political, legal and regulatory framework but also sharply differing development conditions between regions. After World War II Italy achieved an “economic miracle” similar to what China and India are now experiencing, followed by a lengthy phase of decline. Accordingly, we can distinguish the effect of financial development on growth from other potential causal factors while also considering regions with sharply different economic conditions. Our results show that from 1960 to 1980, when the Italian “economic miracle” was still under way, finance played no significant role in favouring the surge in economic growth, which most likely depended on internal consumption. Between 1980 and 2010, by contrast, the great expansion of Italian financial markets and institutions did have a positive effect on regional economic performance, but overall growth rates were nevertheless low. Although our empirical evidence supports the view that finance is more important for growth in less highly developed regions, it also shows that financial development has not helped to overcome the Italian economic divide

Designing OERs to teach Italian pronunciation in an open educational environment: a case study

This case study reports on work that was carried out as part of a project developed by the Open University’s Department of Languages (Collaborative Writing and Peer Review) between November 2011 and May 2012. The project was led by the Open University’s LORO team and the participants were teachers in the Department of Languages. The teachers who took part in the project were interested in the collaborative production of OERs and in benefiting from each other's expertise and feedback in the field of online and blended language teaching and learning. The authors worked collaboratively in producing a set of online audio-visual materials aimed at helping students of Italian to master the pronunciation of five specific sounds. This process provided an example of how the production and design stage of OERs (which involved goal-setting, planning, researching and designing activities) benefited from openness and sharing. This case study is addressed to members of the online teaching community who are interested in the sharing of resources, practices and intellectual capital as a means to enhance professional development and raise individual tutors' and institutional profiles

Bochner transforms, perturbations and amoebae of holomorphic almost periodic mappings in tube domains

We give an alternative representation of the closure of the Bochner transform of a holomorphic almost periodic mapping in a tube domain. For such mappings we introduce a new notion of amoeba and we show that, for mappings which are regular in the sense of Ronkin, this new notion agrees with Favorov's one. We prove that the amoeba complement of a regular holomorphic almost periodic mapping, defined on Cn and taking its values in Cm+1, is a Henriques m-convex subset of Rn. Finally, we compare some different notions of regularity

Kazarnovskii pseudovolume, a clever use of support function

The present paper provides a detailed and almost self-contained introduction to Kazarnovskii mixed pseudovolume

Spoken query processing for interactive information retrieval

It has long been recognised that interactivity improves the effectiveness of information retrieval systems. Speech is the most natural and interactive medium of communication and recent progress in speech recognition is making it possible to build systems that interact with the user via speech. However, given the typical length of queries submitted to information retrieval systems, it is easy to imagine that the effects of word recognition errors in spoken queries must be severely destructive on the system's effectiveness. The experimental work reported in this paper shows that the use of classical information retrieval techniques for spoken query processing is robust to considerably high levels of word recognition errors, in particular for long queries. Moreover, in the case of short queries, both standard relevance feedback and pseudo relevance feedback can be effectively employed to improve the effectiveness of spoken query processing