9/15/2012 3:01:31 PM By
E.J. Reedy
The National Bureau of Economics Research hosted a conference on new data sources for tracking economic activity this past week which has
many relevant and important papers for consideration. As I have said before, we can do better and should do better at developing new relevant and timely measures. BLS offers some ideas and insights on high-growth firms here and Erika McEntarfer's work on job-to-job flows are all quite interesting, just to choose two!
3/31/2010 3:17:25 PM By
E.J. Reedy
What is shared capitalism? When I first came across the term last year, I just stared at the words for a while. Shared capitalism...was this something akin to social entrepreneurship? intrapreneurship? or something totally different?
Well, if you follow the lead of the Foundation for Enterprise Development, then shared capitalism is most equivalent to capitalism where employees have some share of ownership in a company. If you are still a bit confused, then I suggest you take a look at the
Shared Capitalism and Employee Ownership: The Scholarly Agenda Proceedings of the 2009 Beyster Fellowship Symposium. In particular, there is an extensive list of new and existing data sources for research in this area starting on page 12 of the document.
11/24/2009 9:00:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
I have enjoyed watching reactions to Josh Lerner's new book -
Boulevard of Broken Dreams - over the last few weeks from the
Economist, the
New York Times, and also
state-level development groups. Lerner's book, which is a part of a
new Kauffman series at Princeton University Press, and flows in large part from his experience running the
Entrepreneurship Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research, is an easy read, in my opinion, but one which is likely to simultaneously scare and excite policymakers. Excitement will come from having something which is so comprehensive in its global policy review, but one does get scared at reading the many things which appear can go wrong with usually well-intentioned interventions. For those not having read the book, the
SSTI has a nice summary of key points.
For me, Josh's book highlights two things related to measurement:
- Knowing What to Measure is Hard. In most cases, the items which Josh highlights as keys to success or failure are not things which I would have initially thought to measure about a specific intervention although I think I'd have a better idea what to measure about a venture capital-focused policy. Since I am not trying to do such an assessment currently, I am focused on trying to improve data available from the federal agencies so that granular and consistent data on things like business dynamics, gazelle companies, and high-growth firms are available at the regional or subregional level in the United States. Releasing such data in a timely fashion could greatly aid regional economic development.
- Database on Policy Interventions. Tracking substantive changes to program implementations such as the many that Josh describes is too often left to oral history or chance capture. I would love to see some sort of open-source development of a database of key programmatic interventions to support entrepreneurship and/or innovation over time and major timelines, events, changes, etc. Such data would aid so much in looking for impacts but to my knowledge, no such compilation exists for scholars interested in studying policy to draw from (or add to). If anyone has ideas of data products available here or means by which such data could be collected, I would love to hear suggestions. Perhaps its possible mine things like Wikipedia in an automated fashion for some of this info?
9/11/2009 8:07:14 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset covers the diffusion of 104 technologies in 161 countries during the last 200 years. It is an aggregation of some earlier technology diffusion datasets and has most recent year of coverage as 2003. The data is available for
download. Interested potential users should review a
new overview paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The authors summarize their definition of technologies as follows:
"They [technologies] are either: (i) the number of capital goods specifically related to accomplishing particular tasks, (ii) the amounts of particular tasks that have been accomplished, (iii) the number of users of a particular manner to accomplish a task. These three types of measures are best illustrated with three examples. (i) The number of sail ships (measured in tonnage) in use in a country; (ii) Metric tons of steel produced using blastâoxygen steel furnaces; (iii) the number of households that subscribe to cable tv services."
9/10/2009 8:33:16 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is hosting a one-day workshop in Washington, DC on "Accelerating Energy Innovation: Lessons from Multiple Sectors". The presentations will be held on October 23, 2009 the National Press Club, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC.
The program can be found at
http://www.nber.org/~confer/2009/EIf09/program.html. If you would like to attend, please
email Rob Shannon by October 9, 2009.
8/21/2009 3:02:16 PM By
E.J. Reedy
When I first saw the term "shared capitalism" I was a little puzzled but the more I have looked into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Shared Capitalism Project the more interesting I found it. Shared capitalism is defined as "employment relations where the pay or wealth of workers is directly tied to workplace or firm performance." Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and spanning more than 10 years, this project is just getting to the stage where you will soon see a finished University of Chicago publication. But in the meantime, you can find many of the chapters of this book in near final versions online. According to Joseph Blasi, one of the principals on the project:
The Introduction chapter which you can download at this web site (in the top position) will explain the project in some detail including the theoretical background, what we did, and our main empirical findings. In brief, we surveyed over 40,000 employees in 14 firms and hundreds of separate work sites and established a national random sample of the US working population using the General Social Survey (GSS) with a special shared capitalism set of questions on the 2002, 2006, and now 2010 GSS, as a control group.
In Appendix A, they define some of the terms that are common throughout the book. I thought it appropriate to highlight how innovation outcomes were defined:
- Culture for Innovation: Mean of following items, all measured on a 1-4 scale (1=never or almost never, 2=sometimes, 3=often, 4=always or almost always) "How often do the following things occur in your facility?"
a) “Ideas for developing innovative products and services are put forward”
b) “Meaningful time is invested in testing good ideas for innovative products and
services”
c) “Innovative ideas are carefully considered and fairly evaluated”
d) “Resources are made available to support and develop a good idea that could lead to
an innovative product or service”
e) “People who have an innovative idea receive recognition for it”
f) “People who have an innovative idea receive financial rewards for it”
g) “My ideas for innovative products and services have been taken seriously”
- Innovative Ideas: Mean of following items, all measured on a 1-4 scale (1=not at all, 2=very little, 3=to some extent, 4=to a great extent)
a) “I would be willing to be more involved in efforts to develop innovative products and
services”
b) “I have good ideas for innovative products or services”
c) “I have good ideas for improvements in existing products and services”
7/1/2009 4:33:40 AM By
E.J. Reedy
I won't be going to NBER's Summer Institute this year in Boston but several colleagues will. That said, NBER's Summer Institute has a lot to offer researchers. Here are a few highlights I saw on entrepreneurship. I'll post on innovation seperately.
- Health insurance and Entrepreneurship. VINCENZO QUADRINI, University of Southern California. TUESDAY, JULY 14: 10:15 am.
- Entrepreneurial Finance and Non-diversifiable Risk. HUI CHEN, MIT; JIANJUN MIAO, Boston University; and NENG WANG, Columbia University. TUESDAY, July 14: 2:55pm.
- Personal Bankruptcy Law, Debt Portfolios and Entrepreneurship. JOCHEN MANKART, London School of Economics; and GIACOMO RODANO, Banca d'Italia and LSE. FRIDAY, JULY 16: 11:30am.
- All the papers from the Entrepreneurship working group of NBER. TUESDAY, JULY 21.
- High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey.
STUART GRAHAM, Georgia Institute of Technology; ROBERT BARR, ROBERT MERGES, PAM SAMUELSON and TED SICHELMAN, UC, Berkeley. WEDNESDAY, JULY 22: 9:00am.
6/2/2009 12:59:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
5/26/2009 10:22:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
It's been a long week with the holiday in the U.S. meaning that I am a behind in my posting, but I wanted to offer a link to some in-process papers and soon to be book on
international differences in entrepreneurship which NBER organized. In particular, I think these papers are interesting for the variety of data which the scholars used in their analyses and approaches taken to get data to be more defensible by other mainstream academics. The Lusardi and Ardagna paper is a great example of how the authors took some fairly heterogeneous data in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and parsed it down to the most robust subset for the questions they were asking.
4/20/2009 3:06:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Last week, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) held its semi-annual meeting of the Innovation Policy and the Economy working group. While I wasn't in attendance, I've heard from several who were that the session was of good quality. These meetings are held in DC each year to try to engage the policy audience and the research community on important topics in the area. Among this year's papers are some new work by Paula Stephan on
immigration and innovation, as well as Marie and Gerry Thursby which looks at the
effects of Bayh-Dole on research.
Read all the papers.