Elizabeth Webster

Determinants of Household Saving in Australia

This paper uses a unique survey of consumers to test several separate but inter-related hypotheses of household saving. Unit records from 17,585 Australian households are available, which enables the incorporation of a range of household characteristics that may be important factors for saving behaviour, but which are not typically available to researchers undertaking macroeconomic analyses. An ordered probit estimation method is used, and the results support the view that current incomes are perhaps the most important determinant of saving. However, it can also be seen that demographics and householders level of economic optimism play a key role.

Firm size and the use of intellectual property rights

Innovation markets are often characterised by market failure because inventions typically incur high fixed costs relative to marginal costs and their intellectual capital is non-excludable. Intellectual property (IP) rights may attenuate this problem by providing legal recourse for firms to stop imitation by rivals. As IP rights are costly to acquire and enforce, it is often argued that SMEs are disadvantaged in their ability to utilise IP rights. This paper examines the intensity of IP usage by firm size and finds that SMEs actually have higher rates of patent, trade mark and design usage once industry effects are controlled for.

Firms' decisions to innovate and innovation routines

This article investigates the forces that lead some firms to engage in more innovative activities than others using a survey of 360 large Australian firms. Many earlier studies on the determinants of innovation followed the Schumpeterian tradition, and focused on size and market structure as possible causes of innovativeness; however, with the event of new qualitative measures of industry knowledge and managerial styles, these factors have been found to be less important. The results of the present study show that external factors and generic routines common to all industries, such as the extent of learning, knowledge spillovers, appropriability and managerial approach are more important than industry specific forces. Locally-owned companies were also found to be more innovative, other things considered.

The growth of enterprise intangible investment in Australia

Abstract Firms can invest in two types of capital good: tangible commodities such as plant and equipment and intangible commodities such as training and staff development, innovation, marketing, management expertise and workplace relations. Compared with the former, the analysis and measurement of the latter has been relatively neglected. This paper is an attempt to measure the relative growth in aggregate intangible capital and investment since the 1950s. One of the measures calculated suggests that intangible enterprise capital as a ratio of all enterprise capital has grown at an average annual rate of 1.25% over the 50 years to 1998.

Outsourcing Public Employment Services: The Australian Experience

While privatising or tendering out government infrastructure and public works services has become commonplace in Australia, its incursion into human services is comparatively new. Some outsourcing issues and problems are common to both types of service but the welfare or human dimension also brings forth different complexities. This paper discusses the theoretical rationale for outsourcing existing government services in the context of empirical studies. It also provides a short history of outsourcing in Australian job placement and labour market programs. Although large scale outsourcing placement services occurred two years ago (May 1998) with the introduction of the Job Network, there has been no published formal evaluations undertaken due to the lack of publication of administrative data.

Innovation, Technological Conditions and New Firm Survival

High neo-natal mortality is one of the most salient ‘facts’ about firm performance in the industrial organization literature. We model firm survival and examine the relative influence of firm, industry and macroeconomic factors on survival for new vis-a-vis incumbent firms. In particular, we focus on how the intensity of innovation in each industry affects firm survival. Our results imply that while new firms, compared with incumbent firms, thrive in risky and innovative industries, they are also more susceptible to business cycle effects such as changes in the rate of growth of aggregate demand, interest rates and the availability of equity finance. JEL Classification: L11, F13, 034

Hospital type and patient outcomes: an empirical examination using AMI readmission and mortality records

This paper investigates whether there are differences in patient outcomes across different types of hospitals using patient-level data on readmission and mortality associated with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). Hospitals are grouped according to their ownership type (private, public teaching, public non-teaching) and their location (metropolitan, country and remote country). Using data collected from 130 Victorian hospitals on 19,000 patients admitted to a hospital with their first AMI between January 2001 and December 2003, we consider how the likelihood of unplanned re-admission and mortality varies across hospital type. We find that there are significant differences across hospital types in the observed patient outcomes - private hospitals persistently outperform public hospitals.

Do Patents Matter for Commercialization

This paper estimates the effect of a patent grant on the likelihood that an invention will progress to different commercialization stages, using survey data on 3,162 inventions that were the subject of a patent application. We find that about 40 percent of all inventions advanced to the point of market launch and mass production. Although a patent grant had no effect on the decision to proceed with the commercialization process, being refused a patent reduced the probability of attempting market launch and mass production by about 13 percentage points. Over and above this, having protection from several other complementary patents increased the probability of commercialization by an additional 3–5 percentage points.

Another Look at the Relationship between Innovation Proxies

Shortcomings in the treatment of intangible investment in company accounts imply that there is no statistical collection for innovative activity which abides by the logic used for other economic activity data. As a consequence, analysts rely on innovation proxies derived from administrative and survey data. However, it is still unclear exactly how the different proxies are correlated, and whether the choice amongst different proxies matters. In the light of the innovation measurement, this paper takes another look at the relationship between different proxies of firm innovation. The results show that firm-level correlations between survey-based indicators and other proxies for innovation are highest for manufacturing firms and for product innovations.

The Management of Intellectual Property

Bringing together innovative contributions on the management of intellectual property and intellectual property rights by a multi-disciplinary group, the writers argue that the shift towards a knowledge-based economy has increased the importance of intellectual property.