Etla » A-series

Diagnosing the Growing Pains of a Technology-based Industry. An Examination of the Finnish Biotechnology Industry in Light of Empirical Economics

Antti-Jussi Tahvanainen — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Väitöskirjassa tunnistetaan ja tarkastellaan mm. liikkeenjohtoon ja toiminnan organisointiin liittyviä haasteita, joita suomalaiset pienet ja keskisuuret bioteknologiayritykset ovat kohdanneet alan kehittyessä teollisuudeksi.

Väitöskirja todentaa, että yliopistolähtöiset bioteknologiayritykset ovat muun tyyppisiä bioteknologiayrityksiä heikompia hankkimaan rahoitusta, rekrytoimaan osaavaa työvoimaa ja suunnittelemaan kestäviä liiketoimintamalleja.

Publication year: 2011
Pages: 229
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 47

Real Changes in Personal Income Taxation in Finland (in Finnish with English abstract and summary)

admin — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 11:00:00 +0000

The study seeks to find out whether the real burden of the personal taxation has increased or decreased. In order to determine this, we investigate how the same real income has been taxed in different years. Whenever the taxes for the same real income for a given year are higher than for the base year, the real tax burden has increased. If they are lower, the real tax burden has decreased.

The study thus seeks to estimate how changes in the tax regulations affect the real tax burden. It should be kept in mind that the progression in the central government income tax schedule ensures that a real change in income will bring about a change in the tax ration. In case of inflation when the tax schedules are kept nominally the same will also increase the real tax burden.

In calculations of the study it is assumed that the real income remains constant, so that we can get an unbiased measure of the effects of governmental actions in real terms. The main factors influencing the amount of income taxes an individual must pay are as follows :

Gross income (income subject to central and local government taxes).
Deductions from gross income and taxes calculated according to tax schedules.
The central government income tax schedule (progressive income taxation).
The rates for the local taxes and for social security payments (proportional taxation).

In the study we investigate how much a certain group of taxpayers would have paid in taxes according to the actual tax regulations prevailing indifferent years if the income were kept constant in real terms. Other factors affecting tax liability are kept strictly unchanged (as constants). The resulting taxes, expressed in fixed prices, are then compared to the taxes levied in the base year (hypothetical taxation). The question we are addressing is thus how much taxes a certain group of taxpayers with the same socioeconomic characteristics would have paid on the same real income according to the actual tax regulations prevailing in different years. This has been suggested as the main way to measure real changes in taxation, although there are several alternative measures with essentially the same aim.

Next an aggregate indicator of changes in income tax rates is constructed. It is designed to show how much the taxation of income has increased or reduced from one year to next year on average. The main question remains : How aggregation over all income levels should be performed? In order to determine the average real changes in the tax scales the difference functions (difference between actual and hypothetical taxation functions) were aggregated using taxable income as weights. Besides the difference functions, the relative changes in real taxes can be used as indicators of change. In this case the ratio between the taxes computed according to the new and the old situation indicates whether the taxation has become heavier or easier.

The relative changes in tax scales can be described in a way similar to that used in describing the cost of living, or by means of price indices. For example, we can use Laspeyres price index formula for computing the ratio between taxes determined by the new tax scales and the old tax scales. The formula answers the question : How much more or less will be paid in taxes according to the new tax scales than according to the old ones when the real income situation corresponds to the old situation.

Publication year: 2011
Pages: 276
Price: 30€
Language: Finnish
ETLA A 46

Studies on the Diffusion of New Science-based Technologies

Tuomo Nikulainen — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 11:00:00 +0000

Technological change is one of the key driving forces behind economic growth. In this process, the diffusion of new technologies plays a vital role. In particular, the early stages of diffusion, in which knowledge is created and transferred for wider industrial use, are seen as crucial to the broader societal impact of technologies. Therefore, it is essential to understand how technologies diffuse from academia to industry, and to highlight different factors that facilitate or hinder the diffusion process. This thesis addresses the diffusion of nanotechnology and biotechnology in four articles, each highlighting a specific and critical part of the early-stage diffusion process.

The first article focuses on the variety of outcomes that university researchers achieve when interacting with companies. It identifies whether a researchers boundary-spanning position in research collaboration networks is connected with these outcomes. The results suggest that university-industry interaction leads to both tangible and intangible outcomes and that boundary-spanning plays a role in achieving them.

The second article highlights the importance of understanding the unique characteristics of the transferred technology. It compares the specificities of nanotechnology to other science-based technologies such as biotechnology. The empirical results indicate that nanotechnology differs from other science-based technologies in only a few dimensions of technology transfer related to the basic research orientation of nanotechnology.

The third article emphasises the role of smaller technology-dedicated companies in the diffusion process. The paper highlights the importance of understanding the economic value of the patent portfolio of biotechnology-dedicated companies with respect to the companies future growth expectations. The results indicate that there exists a positive connection between growth expectations and the value of patent portfolios; this value could be signalled to external financiers.

The fourth article identifies links between smaller technology-dedicated companies and larger established companies. The latter may act as industrialists when introducing new science-based products and processes to the market. The results of this paper identify several potential diffusion channels for nanotechnology in both traditional and high-tech industries.

The articles provide implications for research, policy and practice. The key implications relate to the role of interdisciplinarity as an important ingredient in producing more industry related knowledge, the technology specificity of the technology transfer process and the different roles smaller and larger companies have in technology diffusion.

Publication year: 2010
Pages: 115
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 45

Essays on the Gender Wage Gap in Finland

admin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 11:00:00 +0000

This dissertation is an empirical study of the gender wage gap in Finland. Much of the dissertation focuses explicitly on the early career as it is found that the first years after labour market entry are of great importance with respect to the overall gender wage gap. The dissertation consists of three essays.

The first essay explores the early-career gender wage gap in the Finnish private sector. I find that the gender wage gap increases significantly during the first ten years after labour market entry accounting for most of the life-time increase in the gender wage gap. The more detailed analysis of the factors contributing to the early-career gender wage focuses on university graduates. This mitigates the problems caused by the most disturbing shortcoming of the data, namely the lack of information on working hours and part-time status. In Finland, part-time rates among university graduates are very low as well as the gender difference in these rates. I consider several explanations for the gender wage gap based on the human capital theory, job mobility and labour market segregation. The results suggest that about 20 to 26 per cent of the average early-career gender wage gap is explained by gender differences in qualifications considered. Of the investigated factors gender differences in the field of education and work experience matter most.

In the second essay, I investigate in more detail the role of university majors in explaining the gender wage gap. Using data from the Confederation of Finnish Industries, significant gender differences in majors among white-collar workers are found. These differences in education account for about 38 per cent of the gender wage gap among young white-collar workers with a bachelor-level degree after controlling for age, year, gender, region, industry and firm size. The corresponding number for young white-collar workers with a master-level degree is roughly 31 per cent. There are no considerable differences in the effects of majors between new entrants and white-collar workers having more work experience. Furthermore, similarity of the results between OLS and panel methods controlling for unobserved individual factors implies that the effect of university majors is unlikely to reflect unobserved heterogeneity. Finally, womens gains from equalizing educational distributions do not depend on the price structures used.

Using data from the Finnish manufacturing sector, the last essay studies the factors contributing to the gender gap in early-career wage growth. The analysis shows that the size of the gender gap in wage growth varies with mobility status, the gap being much higher when changing employers compared to within-firm wage growth. Several explanations for the gender gap in wage growth based on human capital theory and theory of compensating wage differentials are considered. However, much of the gap in wage growth remains unexplained. Further analysis documents that the female penalty in wage growth increases significantly as we move along the conditional wage growth distribution with a sharp acceleration in the gap at the top of the distribution.

JEL: J6, J16, J24, J31, J71
Publication year: 2008
Pages: 167
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 44

Essays on the Impacts of Technology Development and R&D Subsidies

Jyrki Ali-Yrkkö — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 11:00:00 +0000

This thesis studies the impacts of technology development and R&D subsidies. The first essay examines whether public and private R&D funding are substitutes or complements. Particular attention is paid to capital market imperfections by examining what kind of effect financial constraint has on the relationship between public and private funded R&D. According to empirical analyses, public R&D funding does not crowd out privately financed R&D. Instead, the results suggest that receiving a positive decision regarding public R&D funding increases privately funded R&D. The second essay analyses how public R&D financing impacts the labour demand of companies. Empirical results suggest that public R&D financing increases both group-level and domestic R&D employment. However, public funding does not have a statistically significant effect on non-R&D employment. The third essay focuses on the productivity effects of R&D. The results of empirical analyses are two-fold. In the short run (in 1-2 years), no statistically significant productivity impact of R&D is found. However, R&D does have an economically and statistically significant impact when R&D efforts made 3-5 years earlier are taken into account. Hence, a window of almost 5 years is needed to capture the productivity impact of R&D. The fourth essay studies how patent quality impacts the likelihood of a merger or acquisition. To proxy the quality of patents, both forward and backward citations are used. Multinomial logit estimations show that owning patents correlates with becoming a target for a foreign company. The same does not apply to targets for domestic firms. However, the results also indicate that the quality of patents does not have a statistically significant impact on the likelihood of becoming target for a domestic or foreign company.

Publication year: 2008
Pages: 121
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 43

Essays on Stock Option Schemes and CEO Compensation

admin — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 11:00:00 +0000

The essays in this thesis study stock option schemes and CEO compensation in the publicly listed Finnish firms. The first essay studies the determinants of option scheme adoption. It argues that firms with a higher level of market value per employee are able to provide economic incentives for their personnel at a lower cost, thus encouraging the use of options. In addition, share returns from the past year affect the adoption of selective option schemes, but not broad-based plans. The second essay presents empirical evidence on the productivity impacts of stock option schemes. It shows that when endogeneity and dynamics of options are taken into account, there is no statistical evidence on the link between option schemes and firm productivity. The finding is consistent with the hypotheses that predict negligible effects of option plans on firm performance. The third essay studies whether, instead of productivity, option schemes affect firm technical inefficiency. The findings indicate that in the manufacturing sector broad-based scheme firms have higher mean inefficiency than selective or non-option firms. There is also no statistical support for the hypothesis that option schemes may reduce firm technical inefficiency. The fourth essay studies statistical relationships between CEO compensation, firm performance and firm size. It shows that CEO average compensation has increased substantially in 1996-2002. However, the change in CEO compensation, and especially in the total compensation, can be associated with changes in stock market-based measures of firm performance, such as shareholder value and share return. Also, changes in both accounting (ROA%) and stock market-based firm performance measures in the previous year can be associated with the change in CEO compensation in the following year. CEO pay-for-firm size elasticity is estimated to be close to 0.3.

Publication year: 2007
Pages: 187
Price: 42€
Language: English
ETLA A 42

Collective Bargaining and Wage Formation. Performance and Challenges

admin — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 11:00:00 +0000

This volume considers the development of the wage formation and wage bargaining institutions as a response to changes in the bargaining environment. These changes include a lower level of inflation and the growth in intraindustrial trade as firms have become more specialised. The response to these changes will depend on the current institutions and on the characteristics of the bargaining system. Generally there has been some move towards decentralisation; the question is what should be bargained centrally and which issues should be transferred to lower levels. Some of the contributions pay special attention to Nordic regimes using survey results gathered from the Finnish labour market partners.

Publication year: 2005
Pages: 186
Language: English
ETLA A 39

An Econometric Analysis of Time Use in Finnish Households

admin — Fri, 03 Dec 2004 11:00:00 +0000

Publication year: 2004
Pages: 230
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 41

International Megatrends and Growth Prospects of the Finnish Biotechnology Industy

admin — Fri, 02 Jul 2004 11:00:00 +0000

Keywords: spatial agglomeration, price-cost margins, capital structure, intangible assets, input-output analysis

The full report is available for download from Helsinki University of TechnologyŽs website:

http://lib.hut.fi/Diss/2004/isbn9512272164

Publication year: 2004
Pages: 172
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 40

Micro Level Dynamics of Productivity Growth. An Empirical Analysis of the Great Leap in Finnish Manufacturing Productivity in 1975-2000

admin — Tue, 09 Dec 2003 11:00:00 +0000

Publication year: 2003
Pages: 305
Price: 30€
Language: English
ETLA A 38