Entrepreneurial Attractiveness: Amazon, Google, and the Search for Innovative Hot Spots
By Anna Katherine Kropf
Recent economic literature suggests that entrepreneurship in technological fields can spur economic growth, making it a popular topic for city development officials. Yet, this increasingly popular phenomenon is met by many economic questions. One of those questions is which characteristics of metropolitan areas are attractive to entrepreneurs. To answer the question of attractiveness on both the small business and corporate levels, I compare across two case studies: Amazon’s search for a second headquarters and Google’s tech hub network. Using principal component analysis, I statistically deduce seven components of attractiveness from an original 34 variables. These components are then weighted using three methods—a case study, a survey, and an empirical method—to produce comparable indices of attractiveness. Generally, I find that sizeable population and healthy economy are the strongest components. However, the statistically insignificant components that can change an urban area’s ranking considerably are talent and geographic network effects. Ultimately, creating policy to maximize these aspects can change a city’s innovative
trajectory.
Advisor: Dr. Charles Becker | JEL Codes: O, O3, R, R1, R11
What Fosters Innovation? A CrossSectional Panel Approach to Assessing the Impact of Cross Border Investment and Globalization on Patenting Across Global Economies
By Michael Dessau and Nicholas Vega
This study considers the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on innovation in high income, uppermiddle income and lowermiddle income countries. Innovation matters because it is a critical factor for economic growth. In a panel setting, this study assesses the degree to which FDI functions as a vehicle for innovation as proxied by scaled local resident patent applications. This study considers research and development (R&D), domestic savings, imports and exports, and quality of governance as factors which could also impact the effectiveness of FDI on innovation. Our results suggest FDI is most effective as inward direct investment in countries outside the technological frontier possessing adequate existing domestic investment capital and R&D spending to convert foreign investment capital and technological spillover into innovation. Nonetheless, FDI was not a consistent indicator for innovation; rather, the most consistent indicators across this study were R&D and domestic savings. Differences amongst income groups are highlighted as well as their varying responses to our array of causal factors.
Advisor: Lori Leachman, Grace Kim, Michelle Connolly | JEL Codes: A10, B22, C82, E00, E02, O10, O11, O30, O31, O32, O33, O34, O43
A Brief Review and Analysis of Spectrum Auctions in Canada
by Martínez-Cid, Wenfei Jiao, and Zeren Zhang
Abstract
We begin by explaining the importance of efficient spectrum allocation and reviewing Canada’s recent spectrum allocation history. We then use a dataset covering more than 1,200 licenses auctioned from 2001 to 2015 that seeks to account for each auction’s particular rules. Our results confirm that measures of demand such as population covered, income levels, frequency levels, bandwidth, etc. indeed drive license valuation. We also quantify the negative impact on price of setting aside particular license auctions for new entrants, suggesting that the set-aside provision constitutes an implicit subsidy for those firms.
Michelle Connolly, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: D44, D45, D47, L51, O33
What Gets Paid? Analyzing the Major League Baseball Contract Market
By Brian Pollack
This paper aims to assess the efficiency of the Major League Baseball contract market in the past decade, given that teams are employing more analytical approaches to player evaluation. First, analysis of team-level data reveals the most important determinants of run scoring and run prevention, respectively. Models of player contract value, controlling for player-specific variables and environmental factors, then determine what is most significantly rewarded on the free agent market. Overall, teams have identified the individual skills that are most important and compensated them accordingly, and there is evidence to suggest teams are becoming smarter about this in recent years.
Advisor: Michelle Connolly, James Roberts | JEL Codes: D7, O3, Z2
The Rise of Mobile Money in Kenya: The Changing Landscape of M-PESA’s Impact on Financial Inclusion
By Hong Zhu
M-PESA, the hugely popular mobile money system in Kenya, has been celebrated for its potential to “bank the unbanked” and increase access to financial services. This paper provides evidence to support this idea and explores mechanisms through which this might be the case. It specifically looks at the savings products held by individuals and how this changes in relation to M-PESA use. It then constructs an index for measuring the extent to which individuals are integrated into the formal financial sector. This paper argues that M-PESA’s effect on financial inclusion is a growing phenomenon, which suggests that keeping pace with the rapid evolutions of this mobile money system should be a high priority for researchers. As this paper elucidates, M-PESA has become notably more integrated with the formal financial sector in 2013 as compared to 2009, which holds implications for user behavior.
Advisor: Michelle Connolly, Xiao Yu Wang | JEL Codes: D14, E42, G21, G23, O1, O17, O16, O33 | Tagged: Financial Inclusion, Mobile Money, Savings,Technology
Federal and Industrial Funded Research Expenditures and University Technology Transfer licensing
By Trent Chiang
In this paper I relate the numbers of university licenses and options to both university research characteristics and research expenditures from federal government or industrial sources. I apply the polynomial distributed lag model for unbalanced panel data to understand the effects of research expenditures from different sources on licensing activity. We find evidence suggesting both federal and industrial funded research expenditures take 2-3 years from lab to licenses while federal expenditures have higher long-term dynamic effect. Break down licenses by different types of partners, we found that federal expenditures have highest effect with small companies and licenses generating high income. Further research is necessary to analyze the reason for such difference.
Advisor: David Ridley, Henry Grabowski | JEL Codes: I23, L31, O31, O32, O38 | Tagged: Innovation, Research Expenditures, Science Policy, Technology Transfer
Effects of Wages of Government Officials on Corruption in Developing Countries
By Vansh Muttreja
In a world where a majority of countries are suffering from corruption, it is important to study the causes of corruption and how it can be removed. There are many factors that affect corruption, and the one that this thesis focuses on is wages. The goal of this thesis is to understand the effects of wages of government officials on corruption levels in developing countries over time. The reason for looking particularly at developing countries is that corruption is higher and a bigger concern in such countries. The results of the analysis show that in order for developing countries to decrease corruption levels to those of the least 50 corrupt nations, there needs to be an increase of 422.51% in their government wages. The results are not suggestive for all developing countries because only a limited amount of developing countries were analyzed in this thesis. However, they do give us a glimpse into the negative relationship between corruption and wages.
Advisor: Edward Tower, Kent Kimbrough | JEL Codes: N4, O38
Determinants of Migration: A Case Study of Nang Rong, Thailand
By Monitra Mohinchai
The increasing flows of internal migrants resulted from urbanization in developing countries is of great interest to policy makers. This study examines the individual-level and household-level social surveys the Nang Rong Project in 1994-1995 and 2000-2001. Individual characteristics such as gender, age, and years of schooling, and household characteristic such as family size are, significantly and consistently with the human capital model and previous empirical studies, shown to be determinants of a migration decisions. Moreover, migration selectivity differs significantly by migrant destinations. These findings indicate that policy makers should also consider different destination choice of migration, as well as the migrants’ characteristics, when they try to influence migration patterns and flows.
Advisor: Frank Sloan | JEL Codes: O53
An Empirical Study of the Anticommons Effect on Public vs. Private Researchers
by Serena S. Lam
Abstract
The “anticommons effect” is a recently coined term to describe the phenomenon of stifled research and innovation in the biomedical research arena due to the growing number of overlapping patents in particular domains. Murray and Stern (2005) was the first to devise a novel strategy to quantify this effect by looking at the citation trend of papers with patented findings compared to that of non-patented ones published in Nature Biotechnology. This study continues this vein of research by looking at the differential anticommons effect on public vs. private sector researchers by dividing the citations of the articles used in Murray and Stern (2005) into public and private sector citations, and running a negative binomial fixed effects regression through both groups. Similarly, the citations were also divided into high vs. low tier journals, US vs. foreign authors, and scholarly vs. non-scholarly citations for further analysis. It was found that public sector citations dropped by 19.53% for patented articles compared to non-patented papers, while no such effect was found for private sector citations, suggesting that the anticommons effect is salient primarily for public sector researchers. A significant anticommons effect was also found for low tier journal citations (22.25%), US (15.96%) and foreign authored citations (21.72%), and for scholarly citations (17.26%) as measured by the average decrease in yearly citation rates for patented papers.
Professor Paul Ellickson, Faculty Advisor
JEL Codes: I23, O34,
