The Nature of Technological Change and Its Main Implications on National and Local Systems of Innovation

This paper aims at providing a survey (by no means exhaustive) of evolutionary theorizing, where by this we mean all the contributions which possess the methodological building blocks of an evolutionary theory, which this approach identifies as the consideration of dynamics, the presence of microfounded theories, the assumption of bounded rationality and of heterogeneity among agents, the recognition of the continuous appearance of novelty, the view of collective interactions as selection mechanisms, and finally the consideration of aggregate phenomena as emergent properties with nonstable nature. Along this path through the linkages from the micro technological studies to a broad aggregate system, we propose a concept and representation of Innovation Systems -national, regional, sectoral and at the micro levels- whereby their main feature will be related to capture empirically some pieces of the evolutionary approach

Activating Farmers : Uses of entrepreneurship discourse in the rhetoric of policy implementers

Peer reviewe

Who settles for less? Subjective dispositions, objective circumstances, and housing satisfaction

In recent years there has been growing interest in individuals’ self-perceptions of their wellbeing on the grounds that these complement well-established objective indicators of welfare. However, individuals’ assessments depend on both objective circumstances and subjective, idiosyncratic dispositions, such as aspirations and expectations. We add to the literature by formulating a modelling strategy that uncovers how these subjective dispositions differ across socio-demographic groups. This is then tested using housing satisfaction data from a large-scale household panel survey from Australia. We find that there are significant differences in the way in which individuals with different characteristics rate the same objective reality. For instance, male, older, migrant, and Indigenous individuals rate equal housing conditions more favourably than female, younger, Australian-born, and non-Indigenous individuals. These findings have important implications for how self-reported housing satisfaction, and wellbeing data in general, are to be used to inform evidence-based policy

Stigma and labour market outcomes: sex work and domestic work in India

In this paper, we examine whether the earnings of sex workers in India are significantly different from those in domestic work, a trade that is also gendered in nature and can be done with similarly low levels of training and education. We analyse this using data collected during fieldwork in the cities of Kolkata and Delhi in India. Our results confirm that there is a significant difference in wages between the two groups of workers. We consider the extent to which the stigma attached to sexwork contributes to the higher wages in this occupation relative to domestic work. To do this, we control for endogeneity caused by selection on unobservables. We find that stigma is a significant contributory factor to the wage differential. We also preliminarily consider an alternate explanation – that of violence in the trade. We find that the experience of violence in the trade does not affect the take home earnings of the individuals