Knowledge that Transforms

There has been no systematic study of the characteristics of the universities and academic researchers that seem to have contributed most to industrial innovation. Nor do we know how such academic research has been funded. This paper, based on data obtained from sixty-six firms in seven major manufacturing industries and from over two hundred academic researchers, sheds new light on the sources, characteristics, and financing of academic research underlying industrial innovation. The findings should be of interest to economists concerned with technological change and to policymakers attempting to increase the economic payoff from the nation's academic research.

I use household data from El Salvador and Nicaragua to examine the determinants of remittances from international migration. Nearly twice as many households in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, receive remittances from relatives abroad than do households in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and of those who receive remittances, the average remittance received in San Salvador is over double that in Managua-$119/month to $45/month. I find that the role of observable characteristics in explaining differences in the level of remittances, accounting for the self-selection in the decision to remit, is not large. The difference is explained by differences in the behavioral coefficients and by differences in the self-selection bias of those who remit out of the pool of emigrants between the two countries.

The paper searches for links between school quaity and subsequent earnings of students. Using data for white males from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the paper rejects the hypothesis that workers' earnings are independent of which high school they attended. However, traditional measures of school 'quality' such as class size, teachers' salaries and teachers' level of education fail to capture these differences. This result is robust to changes in specification and subsample. The paper contrasts the results with those of D. Card and A. B. Krueger (1992) and speculates that structural changes may have weakened the link between traditional measures of school quality and student outcomes.

Paul Glewwe, Hanan G. Jacoby, An Economic Analysis of Delayed Primary School Enrollment in a Low Income Country: The Role of Early Childhood Nutrition, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 156-169

Jeffrey Englin, J. S. Shonkwiler, Estimating Social Welfare Using Count Data Models: An Application to Long-Run Recreation Demand Under Conditions of Endogenous Stratification and Truncation, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 104-112

A limitation of Audretsch's 1991 study of new-firm survival was the level of aggregation to industries. This precluded linking establishment-specific characteristics, such as organizational structure and size, to post-entry performance. The purpose of this paper is to relate the post-entry performance of individual establishments not only to their technological and market structure environments, but also to establishment-specific characteristics. We do this by estimating a hazard duration function for more than 12, 000 individual establishments in U.S. manufacturing started in 1976 by tracking their subsequent performance over a ten-year period. We conclude that establishment-specific characteristics, which Audretsch was not able to capture in his earlier study, play an important role in shaping the exposure to risk confronting new establishments.

There has been no systematic study of the characteristics of the universities and academic researchers that seem to have contributed most to industrial innovation. Nor do we know how such academic research has been funded. This paper, based on data obtained from 66 firms in seven major manufacturing industries and from over 200 academic researchers, sheds new light on the sources, characteristics, and financing of academic research underlying industrial innovation. The findings should be of interest to economists concerned with technological change and to policy makers attempting to increase the economic payoff from the nation's academic research.

EDUCATION;TEACHING;MACROECONOMICS