Introduction to "Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century"
Javier Miranda
Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century,
NBER Studies in Income and Wealth, Vol 78 /
2021
Abstract
Measuring innovation is challenging both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growing importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies. This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to, and data sources for, measurement—such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm, and the use of trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business startups, and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution. The research suggests potential strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, such as more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space, and expanding the measurement of the GDP impacts of innovation in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing.
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Measuring and Accounting for Innovation in the Twenty-First Century
Carol Corrado, Jonathan Haskel, Javier Miranda, Daniel Sichel
NBER Studies in Income and Wealth,
2021
Abstract
Measuring innovation is challenging both for researchers and for national statisticians, and it is increasingly important in light of the ongoing digital revolution. National accounts and many other economic statistics were designed before the emergence of the digital economy and the growing importance of intangible capital. They do not yet fully capture the wide range of innovative activity that is observed in modern economies.
This volume examines how to measure innovation, track its effects on economic activity and prices, and understand how it has changed the structure of production processes, labor markets, and organizational form and operation in business. The contributors explore new approaches to, and data sources for, measurement—such as collecting data for a particular innovation as opposed to a firm, and the use of trademarks for tracking innovation. They also consider the connections between university-based R&D and business startups, and the potential impacts of innovation on income distribution.
The research suggests potential strategies for expanding current measurement frameworks to better capture innovative activity, such as more detailed tracking of global value chains to identify innovation across time and space, and expanding the measurement of the GDP impacts of innovation in fields such as consumer content delivery and cloud computing.
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18.03.2021 • 9/2021
Economic mobility likely to increase significantly after relaxation – but also number of COVID-19 cases
The relaxation of Corona containment measures from the beginning of March 2021 lead to a significant increase in economic mobility and thus also in personal contacts in Germany. Estimates suggest that the recent relaxations increase economic mobility by more than ten percentage points and the number of new infections and deaths in Germany by 25%. Because both continued lockdowns and relaxations carry significant negative consequences, it is even more important to enable further relaxations through better testing and quarantine strategies and by increasing the pace of vaccination without putting people's health at risk.
Oliver Holtemöller
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Can Mentoring Alleviate Family Disadvantage in Adolescence? A Field Experiment to Improve Labor-Market Prospects
Sven Resnjanskij, Jens Ruhose, Simon Wiederhold, Ludger Woessmann
Abstract
We study a mentoring program that aims to improve the labor-market prospects of school-attending adolescents from disadvantaged families by offering them a university-student mentor. Our RCT investigates program effectiveness on three outcome dimensions that are highly predictive of adolescents later labor-market success: math grades, patience-social skills, and labor-market orientation. For low-SES adolescents, the one-to-one mentoring increases a combined index of the outcomes by half a standard deviation after one year, with significant increases in each dimension. Part of the treatment effect is mediated by establishing mentors as attachment figures who provide guidance for the future. The mentoring is not effective for higher-SES adolescents. The results show that substituting lacking family support by other adults can help disadvantaged children at adolescent age.
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Names and Behavior in a War
Štěpán Jurajda, Dejan Kovač
Journal of Population Economics,
No. 1,
2021
Abstract
We implement a novel empirical strategy for measuring and studying a strong form of nationalism—the willingness to fight and die in a war for national independence—using name choices corresponding to a previous war leader. Based on data on almost half a million soldiers, we first show that having been given a first name that is synonymous with the leader(s) of the Croatian state during World War II predicts volunteering for service in the 1991–1995 Croatian war of independence and dying during the conflict. Next, we use the universe of Croatian birth certificates and the information about nationalism conveyed by first names to suggests that in ex-Yugoslav Croatia, nationalism rose continuously starting in the 1970s and that its rise was curbed in areas where concentration camps were located during WWII. Our evidence on intergenerational transmission of nationalism is consistent with nationalist fathers purposefully reflecting the trade-off between within-family and society-wide transmission channels of political values. We also link the nationalist values we proxy using first name choices to right-wing voting behavior in 2015, 20 years after the war.
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Heterogeneity in Criminal Behaviour after Child Birth: the Role of Ethnicity
Kabir Dasgupta, André Diegmann, Tom Kirchmaier, Alexander Plum
Abstract
This paper documents behavioral differences in parental criminality between majority and minority ethnic groups after child birth. The particular effect we exploit is that of the gender of the first-born child on fathers’ convictions rates. Based on detailed judicial and demographic data from New Zealand, we first show that the previously documented inverse relationship between having a son and father’s criminal behaviour holds across the average of the population. However, when splitting the fathers’ sample by ethnicity, the effect appears to be entirely driven by the white part of the population and that there is no effect on the native Maori. The strong ethnic divide is observed along many dimensions and challenges the implicitly made assumption in the economics of crime literature that findings are universally applicable across cultures and race.
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14.10.2020 • 21/2020
Recovery Loses Momentum ‒ Economy and Politics Still Shaped by the Pandemic
The corona pandemic leaves substantial marks in the German economy and its impact is more persistent than assumed in spring. In their autumn report, the leading German economic research institutes have revised their economic outlook downwards by roughly one percentage point for both this and next year. They now expect gross domestic product to fall by 5.4% in 2020 (previously -4.2%) and to grow by 4.7% (5.8%) in 2021 and 2.7% in 2022.
Oliver Holtemöller
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08.10.2020 • 20/2020
Populistische Strömungen in Europa: Leopoldina und IWH laden zu Dialogveranstaltung ein
Politische Spannungen in Europa nehmen zu und gefährden die europäische Integration. Angesichts der Coronavirus-Pandemie sowie ihrer Auswirkungen auf die Wirtschaft fordern populistische Parteien und Strömungen zunehmend eine Rückbesinnung auf nationales Vorgehen. Worin diese Europa-Skepsis begründet liegt und wie man auf sie reagieren kann, ist Thema einer gemeinsamen Dialogveranstaltung der Nationalen Akademie der Wissenschaften Leopoldina und des Leibniz-Instituts für Wirtschaftsforschung Halle (IWH). Zu dieser Veranstaltung laden wir Sie herzlich ein und freuen uns über eine redaktionelle Erwähnung in Ihrem Medium.
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01.07.2020 • 11/2020
New Horizon 2020 project: The Challenge of the Social Impact of Energy Transitions
Funded by the European Commission’s Framework Programme Horizon 2020, the ENTRANCES project recently closed its kick-off meeting with a high scientific and institutional participation, and taking on the challenge of modeling the social impact of the energy transition.
Oliver Holtemöller
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08.04.2020 • 5/2020
Economy in Shock – Fiscal Policy to Counteract
The coronavirus pandemic is triggering a severe recession in Germany. Economic output will shrink by 4.2% this year. This is what the leading economics research institutes expect in their spring report. For next year, they are forecasting a recovery and growth of 5.8%.
Oliver Holtemöller
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