Do social policies foster innovation? Evidence from India's CSR regulation

We examine the effect of social policies on corporate innovation using India's mandatory Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) regulation. This regulation mandates firms with pre-tax profits above a certain threshold to spend 2 % of the profits on CSR. We demonstrate a significant bunching of companies just below the profit threshold post-regulation compared to the pre-regulation period. Firms close to the profit threshold manipulate their earnings to avoid compliance by increasing their R&D expenses. We show that, on average, firms that increase R&D expenses to avoid the regulation apply for one more patent and announce two new products. The increase in R&D expenses and patenting is concentrated in firms with a prior history of innovation. Our results suggest that social policies can generate indirect incentives for innovation.     

Do university mergers create academic synergy? Evidence from China and the Nordic Countries

Since the late 1990s, mergers have been pursued by a large number of national university systems. The mergers have been justified as a way of increasing research performance. This paper examines the impact of mergers on one vital measure of university research performance, the production of publications, for 29 Chinese university mergers and 8 Nordic university mergers. Using Web of Science counts of research articles before and after a merger while controlling for the university inputs of R&D funding and research personnel, it was found that Chinese universities exhibited a small but significant increase in the rate of growth of articles following a merger. The Nordic performance was less clear cut. Our findings support the belief that mergers of similarly sized institutions usually have little impact on research performance. In contrast, mergers between a large comprehensive university and much smaller universities have a positive impact on overall publications. We also show that cases in which the merger was between a comprehensive university and a medical school resulted in significantly improved performance in terms of scholarly publications. We attribute the improvement to synergies between the basic biological research in the comprehensive university and the more practical research undertaken in medical schools. We conclude with suggestions for policy-makers aiming to create synergies through mergers.     

Do electric vehicle incentives matter? Evidence from the 50 U.S. states

We estimate the effectiveness of policy incentives for adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in the 50 U.S. states. We employ a rich dataset of semi-annual state-level new EV vehicle registrations by make and model from 2010 to 2015 and state-level policy instruments that could affect new EV model registrations. We construct two measures of policy, one which aggregates policy instruments that can be assigned a value and a second that aggregates those without explicit values. Using a within model difference-in-difference estimator with high-dimensional fixed effects, we find that a $1000 increase in the value of a state’s model-specific EV policies increases registrations of that model within the state by 5–11%.     

Do Bugs Sleep?

<正>每当看到虫子们那一对对大眼睛,我们都会产生疑惑,它们没有眼皮,怎么睡觉呢?原来,这与快速动眼期有关。这是一个睡眠的阶段,是全部睡眠阶段中最浅的,眼球在此阶段快速移动,大脑神经元的活动也与大脑清醒的时候相同,而这种现象发生在所有哺乳类动物和鸟类动物身上。     

Have university knowledge flows narrowed?: Evidence from patent data

The rate of university patenting increased dramatically during the 1980s. Did the manner in which knowledge embedded in university patents was managed change during this period of rapid patenting growth? Using a Herfindahl-type measure of knowledge flow concentration and employing a difference-in-differences estimation to compare university-to-firm patent citations across two time periods, we find that the university diffusion premium (the degree to which university knowledge outflows are more widely distributed than those of firms) declined by more than half during the 1980s. In addition, we find that the university diversity premium (the degree to which knowledge inflows used by universities are drawn from a more widely distributed set of prior art holders than those used by firms) also declined by more than half. However, these changes are mostly limited to a narrow set of technology fields (i.e., biotechnology and pharmaceuticals in the outflows case and sub-fields of electronics in the inflows case). The social welfare implications are ambiguous.     

What limits limits?

There are fundamental rules and prin-ciples setting the limits of physical sys-tems.It triggers an interesting thought-can we break the limits under specific ci...     

Do bosons always condense?

We learn in elementary statistical me-chanics that bosonic systems undergo a phase change even without interpar-ticle interactions,called Bose-Einstein condensa...     

What are you doing?

故事教学,采用大家都喜欢的故事为教学材料,语言丰富,教学方法多样不仅学生爱学,教师也爱教。     

From POTS to E-commerce: What Have the Developing Countries Learnt About Property Rights Over the Last 50 Years?

The challenge of electronic commerce is new to the developing world. Will this technology-driven initiative allow developing countries in Asia to leapfrog? Electronic commerce will trot or walk depending upon the property rights shaping its behaviour. The history of information infrastructural provision teaches us that efficient property rights can only be expected in rare circumstances, when the polity has a highly developed civil society and existing institutions produce restraint. Sequencing and the fit between domestic institutions and the types of property rights are important. Well-organized large user groups are clear winners from reforms, but universal service in countries like South Korea and Singapore resulted from state prerogatives. Three layers of an electronic commerce network along with five conditions of property rights efficiency are identified.     

Do systems pass university entrance exams?

Reading Comprehension tests are commonly used to assess the degree to which people comprehend what they read. This is why we work with the hypothesis that it is reasonable to use these tests to assess the degree to which a machine “comprehends” what it is reading. In this work, we evaluate Question Answering systems using Reading Comprehension tests from exams to enter University. This article analyses the datasets generated, the kind of inferences required, the methodology followed in three evaluation campaigns, the approaches presented by participants and current results. Besides, we study the evolution of systems and the main lessons learned in this evaluation process. We also show how current technologies are unable to pass university-entrance exams. This is because these tests require a deep understanding of texts, as well as detecting the similar meaning of phrases with different words. Future directions focused on these ideas seem more promising than including a massive amount of data for training systems, what has allowed systems to obtain outstanding results in Reading Comprehension tests with more straightforward questions. We think this study helps to increase the knowledge about how to develop better Question Answering systems.     

What enables rapid economic progress: What are the needed institutions?

In recent years “institutions” have again become a central focus of economists and other scholars studying the processes of economic growth, and the reasons why nations have differed so greatly in their achievements on this front. However, with few exceptions the exploration of the role of institutions has not been connected with a coherent analysis of the relationships between institutions and institutional change and technological advance. This paper proposes a way of analyzing these relationships. The concept of “social technologies” which support “physical technologies” plays a key role in the analysis.