This paper studies the persistence of innovation in Dutch manufacturing using an unbalanced panel of firm data from four waves of the Community Innovation Survey between 1994 and 2002. We estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic type 2 tobit model accounting for individual effects and handling the initial conditions problem. We find true persistence in the probability of innovating in the high-tech category of industries and spurious persistence in the low-tech category. Furthermore, past innovation output intensity affects, albeit to a small extent, current innovation output intensity in the high-tech category, while no such evidence is found in the low-tech category

The Public and Private Sectors in the Process of Innovation: Theory and Evidence from the Mouse Genetics Revolution by Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Julian Kolev, Fiona Murray and Scott Stern. Published in volume 100, issue 2, pages 153-58 of American Economic Review, May 2010

We explore the effects of fat tails on the equilibrium implications of the long-run risks model of asset pricing by introducing innovations with dampened power law to consumption and dividends growth processes. We estimate the model structural parameters by maximum likelihood. We find that the stochastic volatility model with fat tails can generate implied risk premium, expected risk free rate and their volatilities comparable to the magnitudes observed in data. The model with fat tails leads to a significant increase in implied risk premia over the benchmark Gaussian model, but similar values for other equilibrium quantities of interest

In a financial system in which balance sheets are continuously marked to market, asset price changes appear immediately as changes in net worth, and eliciting responses from financial intermediaries who adjust the size of their balance sheets. We document evidence that marked-to-market leverage is strongly procyclical. Such behavior has aggregate consequences. Changes in dealer repos – the primary margin of adjustment for the aggregate balance sheets of intermediaries – forecast changes in financial market risk as measured by the innovations in the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index VIX index. Aggregate liquidity can be seen as the rate of change of the aggregate balance sheet of the financial intermediaries

We examine the firm's choice between an SEO and a PIPE, an innovation in follow-on equity selling mechanism seen in the late 1990s. Our primary finding indicates that the rapid rise of the PIPE market fills the capital needs of firms which may not have access to more traditional alternatives. This lack of access is driven mainly by information asymmetry and weak operating performance. We also show that firms are more likely to choose PIPEs when the general market and the firm's stock are performing poorly. Furthermore, we find that selected firms with access to the public market may prefer a PIPE due to specific cost considerations

Partial credit guarantee schemes have experienced renewed interest from governments keen to promote financial access for small enterprises, not least as a response to the credit crunch in advanced economies. While the market can find uses for partial credit guarantees, the attractions for public policy can be illusory: indeed their most attractive feature for myopic politicians may be the ease with which the true cost of guarantees can be understated, at least at the outset. In practice, the actual fiscal cost of existing schemes has varied widely across countries and has represented a high per dollar subsidy in some cases. Despite the recent application of some innovative techniques, the social benefit of such schemes has proved difficult to estimate, not least because their goals have been vague. Operational design has influenced the cost and apparent effectiveness of different schemes and has also varied widely. Clear and precise goals, against which performance is regularly monitored, realistic pricing verified by consistent and transparent accounting, and attention to the incentive features of operational design, especially for the intermediaries, are among the prerequisites for such schemes to have a good chance of truly achieving improvements in social welfare

Open source collaborations are increasingly among commercial rms whose interest is pro t. Why would pro t-motivated rms voluntarily share code? One reason is that cost reductions can outweigh increases in rivalry. This is especially persuasive when the contributors make complementary products. However, cost reductions do not explain why open source is a more pro table way of sharing than other forms of licensing. Why would rms use an in exible contract like the GPL? I present a model that shows how open source licensing can lead to higher industrywide pro t than would result if a rst innovator could choose the most pro table license once it nds itself in the position of rst innovator. From behind a veil of ignorance, that is, not knowing which rm will be rst, open source licensing creates higher expected pro t for the industry as a whole, and thus for each rm, than if rst innovators were allowed to choose. In the 1990's, open-source collaborations emerged as a new way of organizing software development (Eric S. Raymond, 1999). In an open-source collaboration, members disclose

Existing empirical research investigating the size of the equity premium has largely consisted of a series of innovations around a common theme: producing a better estimate of the equity premium by using better data or a better estimation technique. The equity premium estimate that emerges from most of this work matches one moment of the data alone: the mean difference between an estimate of the return to holding equity and a risk-free rate. We instead match multiple moments of U.S. market data, exploiting the joint distribution of the dividend yield, return volatility, and realized excess returns, and find that the equity premium lies within 50 basis points of 3.5%, a range much narrower than was achieved in previous studies. Additionally, statistical tests based on the joint distribution of these moments reveal that only those models of the conditional equity premium that embed time variation, breaks, and/or trends are supported by the data. In order to develop the joint distribution of the dividend yield, return volatility, and excess returns, we need a model of price and return fundamentals. We document that even recently developed analytically tractable models that permit autocorrelated dividend growth rates and discount rates impose restrictions that are rejected by the data. We therefore turn to a wider range of models, requiring numerical solution methods and parameter estimation by the simulated method of moments

This paper studies the impact of financial development on asset valuation. We model the agency theoretic perspective of risk-averse investors and financiers in a general equilibrium setting under the framework of rational expectations (i.e., symmetric information). We focus on real estate, as it constitutes a special case of complete market contracting where adverse selection and moral hazard are easily mitigated. Our results illustrate an increase in pareto-efficiency, as financial architecture advances from: (i) banks to capital markets; and (ii) plain vanilla debt to an innovative one with participation clauses. This is attributed to the reduction in agency costs and cross-sectional risk-sharing, leading to an increase in the value of property. Our results predict that an optimal financial system will orient itself towards efficient financial contracts, irrespective of its source of origination. We also rationalize the co-existence of banks and capital markets, and generalize our results under a set of restrictive conditions

Nous prsentons les rsultats d'une tude portant sur l'valuation de crances ventuelles de style europen pour une grande varit de caractristiques lies au rendement des actifs sousjacents. Les rsultats de notre valuation proposent en temps discret une formule tat-espace infinie, partir du principe de non-arbitrage et d'une mesure de martingale quivalente. Notre approche permet de tenir compte de formes gnrales d'htroscdasticit dans les rendements et d'obtenir, dans des cas spciaux, des rsultats d'valuation lis aux processus homoscdastiques. Elle permet aussi de considrer les innovations conditionnellement non normales en matire de rendement, ce qui reprsente un facteur critique, compte tenu du fait que l'htroscdasticit ne permet pas, elle seule, de saisir pleinement le caractre ironique de l'option. Nous analysons une catgorie de mesures de martingale quivalentes dont la dynamique du rendement risque-neutre obtenu est de la mme famille de distribution que la dynamique du rendement physique. Dans ce cas, notre cadre d'tude soutient les rsultats d'valuation obtenus par Nous tendons ces rsultats aux mesures de martingale quivalentes plus gnrales et aux modles de volatilit stochastique en temps discret et analysons aussi la relation entre nos rsultats et ceux obtenus dans le cas des modles en temps continu