Highlights • Estimates a decline in demand and firm performance from negative regulatory shocks.• Quantifies the loss to the firm using an event study.• Estimates the losses attributable to declines in future innovation.• Supports the view that quicker drug access today may mean less innovation tomorrow.
We propose a combinatorial model of economic development. An economy develops by acquiring new capabilities allowing for the production of an ever greater variety of products of increasingly complex products. Taking into account that economies abandon the least complex products as they develop over time, we show that variety first increases and then decreases in the course of economic development. This is consistent with the empirical pattern known as 'the hump'. Our results question the common association of variety with complexity. We further discuss the implications of our model for future research.
Despite increasing concerns about the validity of published research, the issue of how the scientific community can maintain a high-quality body of research is not well understood. We consider the case of systematic reviews in health care, and explore whether risk of bias ratings communicated within these reviews may help shift scientists’ attention towards published research that is at a low risk of bias. We focus on publications deemed at risk of bias due to selective reporting; that is, scientific articles with high chances of systematic errors in the published research findings due to flaws in the reporting. Using a matched-sample control group we find that, after potential bias is signalled in systematic reviews, publications at high risk of bias attract less attention – as indicated by fewer follow-on citations – when compared to a control group of low risk of bias publications. We extend our analysis by considering those cases where risk of bias is unclear, and by examining how different features of the rating system may affect the magnitude of the main effect. The findings provide evidence about whether systematic reviews can play a role in signalling biases in the scientific literature, over and above their established role of synthesising prior research.
This paper contributes to the literature on job polarizaton, whereby mid-skill jobs disappear because of increased mechanization and digitization of routine tasks. While the recent empirical literature has focused on the relative importance of technical change and globalization as the main drivers of job polarization, the role of within firm organizational changes has remained unexplored. Our study contributes to filling this gap by investigating how technological and organizational changes affect the mix of jobs within the firm. To this end we merge two firm level surveys from Denmark and add registry data to gain detailed knowledge of changes in the firms’ occupational structure. We construct measures of work organization in line with previous research and using a translog model we show that changes in work organization are associated with polarization by substituting and complementing different skill groups, even in the absence of technological change and changes in offshoring. The results show not only that the organizational level is central to understanding possible trends towards job polarization, but also demonstrate that changes in work organization often co-occur with changes in technology and in offshoring behavior, leading to interactions effects between organizational change, and technology and offshoring on job polarization.
In this paper, we analyze the compelling issue of monetary valuation of a scientific publication. While many academic scholars tend to overlook the topic, as being either too difficult or even meaningless, policymakers begin to use very rough tools for evaluating publications, which have many limitations, as we will discuss in this work. The main objective of this work is to address this open problem by stimulating further discussion on the topic and future research developments. We provide an overview of different methods to value scientific publications. We discuss their main hypotheses, pros and cons by means of an illustration based on Sapienza University of Rome. Although we begin to address the issue of monetary valuation of scientific publications, presenting a range of available methods and listing the limits and benefits of each, further methodological and empirical research is still needed to comply with policy and stakeholders' needs which we expect will increase in the near future.
Problem-solving by everyday individuals is thought to occur as a two-step process. First, an individual identifies or formulates a problem, followed by entering into a subsequent search to find the best solution. Here, however, we consider an alternative process that everyday individuals may use for solution finding first theorized by von Hippel and von Krogh (2016). Specifically, von Hippel and von Krogh proposed that everyday individuals may sometimes discover a solution and the need it satisfies simultaneously without the need for apriori problem formation, a cognitive process they called “need-solution pair recognition”. Utilizing a rich literature from psychology and neuroscience, we propose that seemingly spontaneous discoveries found by need-solution pair recognition are natural products of the object recognition system and its underlying mechanisms. This view asserts that on encountering an object and reasoning how it might be used (i.e. functional object understanding), an individual's perception of an object may culminate in recognizing the object as a solution, and in some cases, as a solution to a problem previously unknown to him or her, thus bypassing formal problem-formulation and active solution searching entirely. To empirically test this view, we manipulated the ability of everyday individuals to functionally reason about objects while we examined the spontaneous occurrence of solutions found by either need-solution pair recognition or traditional problem-first problem-solving. Consistent with our hypothesized mechanism, our results indicate that need-solution pair recognition occurs more frequently when constraints on functional object understanding are reduced. That is, we found that needsolution pair discoveries outpaced solutions found from traditional problem solving, in environments with unfamiliar objects, where participants were not directed to solve specific problems. Our results provide clear evidence that everyday individuals in the household sector do not always innovate through traditional problem-solving processes, but instead may arrive at solutions as they recognize and reason about objects. Implications for research and practice in household innovation, and for innovation more generally are considered.
One the one hand, complex technologies offer substantial economic benefits, and on the other, they are difficult to invent and to imitate, and they refuse a fast dissemination. This two-sidedness motivates the idea that regions’ competitive advantages and, in consequence, their economic growth, originate in their ability to produce and utilize complex technologies. However, the relationship between technological complexity and regional economic growth has rarely been empirically investigated. Here, we address this pressing research gap by assessing the complexity of technological activities in 159 European NUTS 2 regions and relating it to their economic growth from 2000 to 2014. Our empirical results suggest that technological complexity is an important predictor of regional economic growth. A 10% increase in complexity is associated with a 0.45% GDP per capita growth. By showing that technological complexity is important for regional economic growth, our results fuel current policy debates about optimal regional policies such as the Smart Specialization strategy.
We study the relationship between industry variety in a start-up's home location and the start-up's internationalization in terms of both the likelihood of and persistence in exporting. Using a unique sample of Swedish start-ups, we find that related industry variety is positively associated with exporting likelihood and persistence, whereas unrelated industry variety is positively associated with exporting likelihood and persistence when the start-ups’ employees possess technological knowledge. We also find that employees’ international experience strengthens the positive relationship between related industry variety and start-ups’ export persistence. We provide auxiliary evidence of the proposed mechanisms through which related and unrelated industry variety affects start-ups’ internationalization—that is, through their effects on start-ups’ ability to launch novel products in foreign markets. The findings of our study provide policymakers preliminary evidence on the