This handbook looks to provide academics and students with a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the phenomenon of innovation. Innovation spans a number of fields within the social sciences and humanities: Management, Economics, Geography, Sociology, Politics, Psychology, and History. Consequently, the rapidly increasing body of literature on innovation is characterized by a multitude of perspectives based on, or cutting across, existing disciplines and specializations. Scholars of innovation can come from such diverse starting points that much of this literature can be missed, and so constructive dialogues missed. The editors of The Oxford Handbook of Innovation have carefully selected and designed twenty-one contributions from leading academic experts within their particular field, each focusing on a specific aspect of innovation. These have been organized into four main sections, the first of which looks at the creation of innovations, with particular focus on firms and networks. Section Two provides an account of the wider systematic setting influencing innovation and the role of institutions and organizations in this context. Section Three explores some of the diversity in the working of innovation over time and across different sectors of the economy, and Section Four focuses on the consequences of innovation with respect to economic growth, international competitiveness, and employment. An introductory overview, concluding remarks, and guide to further reading for each chapter, make this handbook a key introduction and vital reference work for researchers, academics, and advanced students of innovation. Contributors to this volume - Jan Fagerberg, University of Oslo William Lazonick, INSEAD Walter W. Powell, Stanford University Keith Pavitt, SPRU Alice Lam, Brunel University Keith Smith, INTECH Charles Edquist, Linkoping David Mowery, University of California, Berkeley Mary O'Sullivan, INSEAD Ove Granstrand, Chalmers Bjorn Asheim, University of Lund Rajneesh Narula, Copenhagen Business School Antonello Zanfei, Urbino Kristine Bruland, University of Oslo Franco Malerba, University of Bocconi Nick Von Tunzelmann, SPRU Ian Miles, University of Manchester Bronwyn Hall, University of California, Berkeley Bart Verspagen , ECIS Francisco Louca, ISEG Manuel M. Godinho, ISEG Richard R. Nelson, Mario Pianta, Urbino Bengt-Ake Lundvall, Aalborg

The Oxford Handbook of Innovation

Models that depict innovation as a smooth, well-behaved linear process badly misspecify the nature and direction of the causal factors at work. Innovation is complex, uncertain, somewhat disorderly, and subject to changes of many sorts. Innovation is also difficult to measure and demands close coordination of adequate technical knowledge and excellent market judgment in order to satisfy economic, technological, and other types of constraints—all simultaneously. The process of innovation must be viewed as a series of changes in a complete system not only of hardware, but also of market environment, production facilities and knowledge, and the social contexts of the innovation organization.

An Overview of Innovation

The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.

/pdf/government-matters-iii-governance-indicators-for-1996-2002-5fnk2bezp5.pdf

Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002

Government matters III: governance indicators for 1996-2002

This paper explores a monetary policy model with habit formation for consumers, in which consumers’ utility depends in part on current consumption relative to past consumption The empirical tests developed in the paper show that one can reject the hypothesis of no habit formation with tremendous condence, largely because the habit formation model captures the gradual hump-shaped response of real spending to various shocks The paper then embeds the habit consumption specication in a monetary policy model and nds that the responses of both spending and inflation to monetary policy actions are signicantly improved by this modication (JEL D12, E52, E43)

/pdf/habit-formation-in-consumption-and-its-implications-for-5c8leloxjg.pdf

Habit Formation in Consumption and Its Implications for Monetary Policy Models

Standard cross-national measures of corruption are assembled through surveys. We propose a novel alternative objective measure that consists of the difference between a measure of the physical quantities of public infrastructure and the cumulative price government pays for public capital stocks. Where the difference is larger between the monies spent and the existing physical infrastructure, more money is being siphoned off to mismanagement, fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and embezzlement; that is, corruption is greater. We create this measure for Italy’s 95 provinces and 20 regions as of the mid-1990s, controlling at the regional level for possible differences in the costs of public construction. THIS METHODOLOGICAL note presents a new measure of corruption, one based on the difference between the amounts of physically existing public infrastructure (roads, schools, hospitals, etc.) and the amounts of money cumulatively allocated by government to create these public works. Where the difference between the two is larger, more money is being lost to fraud, embezzlement, waste, and mismanagement; in other words, corruption is greater. The utility and novelty of this measure come first from the fact that it draws on data other than the surveys that are currently typically used to construct indices of corruption. Second, our measure operationalizes insights of development scholars regarding possible causes of low growth among poor nations. Existing literature suggests that the costs of public investment and the value of existing capital may differ substantially, and that as much as half of government investment in developing nations may be ‘‘missing’’ (Pritchett, 1996, 2000). However, to the best of our knowledge, no one has previously developed a systematic way to measure this. We propose such a method and, using Italian data, detail the construction of an index of missing infrastructure, one that we call ‘‘corruption.’’ The measure that we propose is of course only a proxy for corruption. It does not directly measure it, an enterprise that is not possible since corruption is a complex set of variable interactions, processes, and phenomena with no single metric. We are aware as well that the measure we propose captures some inefficiencies as well as various illegal activities that comprise

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/gov2126/files/goldenpicci_2005.pdf

Proposal for a new measure of corruption, illustrated with italian data

This paper provides a descriptive analysis of the long- and short-run correlations among saving, investment, and growth rates for 123 countries over the period 1961-94. Three results are robust across data sets and estimation methods: i) lagges saving rates are positively related to investment rates; ii) investment rates Granger cause growth rates with a negative sign; iii) growth rates Granger-cause investment with a positive sign.

/pdf/saving-growth-and-investment-a-macroeconomic-analysis-using-5foi21eix5.pdf

Saving, Growth, and Investment: A Macroeconomic Analysis Using a Panel of Countries

The worldwide count of priority patents: A new indicator of inventive activity

https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/18430/1/MPRA_paper_18430.pdf

The Internationalization of Inventive Activity: A Gravity Model using Patent Data

This paper analyzes the political determinants of the distribution of infrastructure expenditures by the Italian government to the country's 92 provinces between 1953 and 1994. Extending implications of theories of legislative behavior to the context of open-list proportional representation, we examine whether individually powerful legislators and ruling parties direct spending to core or marginal electoral districts, and whether opposition parties share resources via a norm of universalism. We show that when districts elect politically more powerful deputies from the governing parties, they receive more investments. We interpret this as indicating that legislators with political resources reward their core voters by investing in public works in their districts. The governing parties, by contrast, are not able to discipline their own members of parliament sufficiently to target the parties' areas of core electoral strength. Finally, we find no evidence that a norm of universalism operates to steer resources to areas when the main opposition party gains more votes.

/pdf/pork-barrel-politics-in-postwar-italy-1953-1994-1z531h0n3r.pdf

Lucio Picci

Papers

Proposal for a new measure of corruption, illustrated with italian data

Saving, Growth, and Investment: A Macroeconomic Analysis Using a Panel of Countries

The worldwide count of priority patents: A new indicator of inventive activity

The Internationalization of Inventive Activity: A Gravity Model using Patent Data

Pork Barrel Politics in Postwar Italy, 1953-1994