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

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.

The first article focuses on the variety of outcomes that university researchers achieve when interacting with companies. It identifies whether a researcher’s 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.

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, women’s 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.

The results for R&D are in accordance with the views that innovations and technological progress entail experimentation, selection and reallocation of resources at the microlevel that are important for economic development. An increase in productivity divergenceseems to precede increases in creative destruction, which also fits the picture. However, at the same time creative destruction also compresses productivity dispersion by cleansing low productivity units. No empirical evidence is found that wage dispersion between plants has a positive effect. The positive effect of international trade, in turn, points to the importance of product market competition which is emphasised in the recent theoretical literature. Finally, the main part of productivity-enhancing restructuring can be attributed to newly established plants, which indicates the importance of entrants to creative destruction.

Various aspects of identifying and measuring the components of aggregate productivity growth by means of productivity decomposition methods are discussed in detail. It is demonstrated that there is a great variation between the results obtained by different methods. Some new variants of the methods are proposed. These tools have two main advantages. Firstly, they yield components that are useful when evaluating the usefulness of the representative firm model. Secondly, the results are not very sensitive to the usual measurement problems inherent in micro data.

The usual caveat of ignoring labour quality in productivity decompositions is tackled by using linked employer-employee data. These data allow the measurement of labour input in so-called “efficiency units”. No empirical evidence is found that the productivity steps taken have been just factitious increases gained by the displacement of the lower educated and less experienced workers through micro level restructuring.

Productivity-enhancing restructuring also has implications for the dynamics of factor income shares. The payroll shares of plants have been reallocated from plants having a low capital-to-value-added ratio to those having a high capital-to-value-added ratio. The reshuffling of the payroll shares of plants has contributed positively to an increase in the capital’s factor income share at the aggregate level.

Because micro level restructuring is of vital importance for economic growth, the factors that affect this process deserve careful consideration when the policy actions or reforms of institutions are designed. Innovations and R&D are important, but alone they may not be enough. Product market competition is likely to have a decisive role. In addition, well-functioning financial and labour markets and a high skill level in the workforce are also key factors facilitating the renewal of the economy at the micro level.