Tommaso Ciarli

The Effect of Consumption and Production Structure on Growth and Distribution: A Micro to Macro Model

The paper offers a theoretical analysis of long-run economic growth as an outcome of structural changes. We model the microeconomic behaviour of firms in the final good and capital sectors, and the evolution of classes of workers/consumers. We carefully craft economic behaviour onto empirical evidence, and solve the model numerically. The results illustrate the microeconomic properties of the simulated growth patterns. In particular, we observe and explain the interactions between technological change, firm organization, income distribution, consumption behaviour and growth. We confirm the relevance and interdependence of these structural changes, and underline their microeconomic sources.

Knowledge Dynamics, Structural Change and the Geography of Business Services

The paper provides a review of and presents some empirical evidence on the dynamics of knowledge, structural change and spatial concentration of economic activities, focusing on the case of business services (BS). It explores how the role of knowledge has evolved in relation to the dimensions of: (i) science, technology and structural change; (ii) the long‐term processes of tertiarization of the economy – in particular the growth of BS; (iii) the spatial concentration of BS as an outcome of the increasing volume and complexity of knowledge and the need to manage it through spatial proximity. Our arguments are supported by empirical evidence on the spatial concentration of BS in the European regions.

ICT in Industrial Districts: An Empirical Analysis on Adoption, Use and Impact

The aim of this study is to analyse the main determinants of the adoption and use of information and communication technologies (ICT) and the relationship between ICT and the patterns of innovation in an Italian industrial district. The analysis is carried out on a database of 118 textile enterprises located in Biella, a well‐known industrial district specialized in medium to high quality woollen yarns and textiles, that have been interviewed following a structured questionnaire. On the whole, the rate of adoption and use of ICT in Biella is rather low and this confirms the results of other studies on industrial districts that are specialized in traditional sectors. Nevertheless, our analysis also shows that considering ICT as a general technology may be misleading. Instead, it is useful to disentangle the different ICT; in particular, there are significant differences between IT involving production, administration and logistic processes and the communication technologies (CT). Moreover, on a smaller sample of 50 firms we have tested the hypothesis that adoption and use of ICT may positively influence innovation. In this case, we find that different types of innovations, for instance, product, process and organizational innovations, are influenced by very different variables.

Innovation and competition in complex environments

Summary The paper aims to shed light on the relation between technological research, competition and market dynamics, focussing on the role of product modularity. This relation is analysed via qualitative simulation modelling using a simple agent-based model. We define an economic system in which firms compete on the quality characteristics of a certain complex good, in a market where consumers have shown preferences for them. Firms are conceived as bounded rational agents that explore complex product technologies in order to improve their fitness in relation to the selection environment (i.e. the consumers’ evaluation of the characteristics of the final good). The architecture of the good produced in the system is characterised by different degrees of modularity (i.e. the lower the correlations between the contributions of the different product components to the fnal product fitness, the simpler the good’s technology and the higher the degree of modularity). On the other hand, the impact of product modularity on industrial dynamics is analysed using a set of quite homogeneous firms. First, the model yields highly differentiated dynamics for firms that start from similar initial conditions, pointing to the importance of their research strategies. Second, the dynamic patterns obtained show that firms may easily end up in technological lock-in in spite of initial good performance, suggesting that path-dependence could be broken. Third, modularity impinges directly upon market results: a decrease in modularity, by increasing the difficulty in searching the complex technology, selects a limited number of firms, thus determining concentration in market shares. Finally, the industrial dynamics are influenced by the evolution of the quality of the fnal good.

Towards indicators for 'opening up' science and technology policy

M.M. is funded by the Conselleria d’Innovaci´o, Recerca i Turisme of the Government of the Balearic Islands and the European Social Fund with grant code FPI/2090/2018. J.A., M.M., S.M. and J.J.R. also acknowledge funding from the project Distancia-COVID (CSIC-COVID-19) of the CSIC funded by a contribution of AENA, from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the AEI and FEDER (EU) under the grant PACSS (RTI2018-093732-B-C22) and the Maria de Maeztu program for Units of Excellence in R&D (MDM-2017-0711). A.B. and V.N. acknowledge support from the UK EPSRC New Investigator Award Grant No. EP/S027920/1. GG, SH and SM acknowledge support from from NSF Grant IIS-2029095 and the US Army Research Office under Agreement Number W911NF-18-1-0421. A.K. is supported by the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship through the Department of Defense.Trabajo presentado en la Plant and Animal Genome XXII Conference, celebrada en San Diego del 11 al 15 de enero de 2014.Chinchilla-Rodriguez, Zaida; Lariviere, Vincent; Costas, Rodrigo; Robinson-Garcia, Nicolas and Sugimoto, Cassidy Rose. (2017). Building ties across countries: International collaboration, field specialization, and global leadership. 23th International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators, STI2018. Leiden, The Netherlands, 12-14 September 2018, p. 1509-1518.Resumen del trabajo presentado al APS March Meeting, celebrado en Baltimore, Maryland (USA) del 14 al 18 de marzo de 2016.The results of the first sampling of myxomycetes from the North of Chile are reported in this paper. The survey forms part of the project Global Biodiversity of Eumycetozoans and is the first of a three phase north-south (more than 5,000 km), transect of the country. This phase was between 18o and 30o South latitudes and encompassed the arid and semi-arid regions known as the Atacama Desert. A total of 24 species of Myxomycetes from 11 genera have been identified from these extreme environments, 14 are new records for Chile and 4 (Badhamia dubia, Didymium synsporon, Echinostelium fragile and Physarum spectabile) are previously unknown for South America. Comments are provided on morphology, distribution and ecology.We introduce a new game to the experimental literature and use it to study how behavioral phenomena affect the tradeoffs between centralized and decentralized management. Our game models an organization with two divisions and one central manager. Each division must choose or be assigned a product. Ignoring asymmetric information, the underlying game is an asymmetric coordination game related to the Battle of the Sexes. In equilibrium, the divisions coordinate on identical products. Each division prefers an equilibrium where the selected products are closest to its local tastes while central management prefers the efficient equilibrium, determined by a randomly state of the world, which maximizes total payoffs. The state of the world is known to the divisions, but the central manager only learns about it through messages from the divisions who have incentives to lie. Contrary to the theory, overall performance is higher under centralization, where the central manager assigns products to divisions after receiving messages from the divisions, than under decentralization where the divisions choose their own products. Underlying this, mis-coordination is common under decentralization and divisions fail to use their information when they do coordinate. Mis-coordination is non-existent under centralization and there is a high degree of truth-telling by divisions as well. Performance under centralization is depressed by persistent sub-optimal use of information by center managers.Trabajo presentado en el Workshop: Groups, Inequality, and Conflict, organizado por el Centre for the Study of Equality, Social Organization and Performance (ESOP), en Oslo durante el 6 de julio de 2017Trabajo presentado al XII Scientific Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society (SEA), celebrado en Bilbao del 18 al 22 de julio de 2016.Trabajo presentado a la ORCID-CASRAI Joint Outreach Conference & Codefest (Consortia Advancing Standards in Research Administration Information), celebrada en Barcelona (Espana) del 18 al 19 de mayo de 2015.4 pags.; 4 figs.; ILRC27, City College of New York, New York City, July 5 - July 10, 2015; http://ilrc27.org/VI Simposio Internacional de Ciencias del Mar - VI International Symposium of Marine Sciences (ISMS 2018), 20- 22 June 2018, Vigo.-- 2 pages16 pages, 9 figures, 6 tables, 44 references.-- E-mail: delrio@irnase.csic.es (J.C. del Rio)Financial support from Mobility Program ‘Salvador de Madariaga 2016’ and State Programme of Research, Development and Innovation oriented to the Challenges of the Society (CSO2014-57770-R) funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of Spain and the Science of Science Innovation and Policy program of the National Science Foundation in the United States (NSF #1561299).

The Complex Interactions between Economic Growth and Market Concentration in a Model of Structural Change

We study the relation between variety, market concentration, and economic growth, along different phases of economic development which entail a number of changes to the structure of production and consumption in the economy. We focus on three aspects of structural change, which are connected and are correlated to variety, market concentration, and economic growth: (i) product quality; (ii) firms’ mark-ups; and (iii) imitation of consumer preferences for price and quality. We model the interactions among several aspects of structural change such as firm size and hierarchical structure, innovation in capital vintages, the emergence of social classes, income distribution, and consumer preferences across and within classes. We find that market concentration has a significant and positive impact on economic growth only in the presence of sufficiently large demand. The strongest effects emerge in the presence of a more skewed firm size distribution and firms producing higher priced and higher quality goods. We find also that this effect is influenced strongly by different aspects of structural change. Changes in the behaviour (or income) of the less wealthy income classes is crucial as is investment in new capital vintages, and the emergence of diverse income classes with heterogeneous consumption preferences. In contrast, we find that supply side product variety, coeteris paribus, has no significant effect on growth.

Under-reporting research relevant to local needs in the global south. Database biases in the representation of knowledge on rice

This paper aims at improving our understanding of the attributes of academic researchers that influence the capacity to identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. We investigate a number of factors highlighted in the literature as influencing the entrepreneurial activities undertaken by academics. Our results show that identification and exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities are shaped by different factors. While identification of commercial opportunities is driven by prior entrepreneurial experience and the excellence of the academic work, exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities is driven by the extent of previous collaboration with industry partners, cognitive integration and prior entrepreneurial experience.Trabajo presentado a la 15th International Conference on Scientometrics & Informetrics, celebrada en Estambul (Turquia) del 29 de junio al 4 de julio de 2015.

Organisation of Industry and Innovation Dynamics

The paper aims at investigating how the organization of a certain industry evolves once the competition among its firms, producing a ‘complex’ (i.e. non-modular) product, is modeled as the intertwining of innovative search and organizational change. In order to take the full roster of participants into account, and to retain the inner complexity of their decisions, a Pseudo–NK model is built–up in which a population of firms is called to match a technological frontier. By evolving along different stagesof the sector’s life-cycle, such a kind of technological calls for a trade–off between two strategies of cost–reduction through either outsourcing ortechnological search. Overall, the simulation results confirm previous literature as, for example, in the introductory stage of the industry life–cycle,marked by frequent and intense jumps of the technological frontier, firms need to vertically integrate in order to have higher chances to win the competition for a new standard. On the contrary, in the decline stage,in which the technological frontier almost stabilizes, deverticalization allows firms to better compete on costs. These results change if suppliers are allowed to innovate, as they are more likely to lock the market in sub–optimal configurations.

Innovation for inclusive structural change. A framework and research agenda

The paper proposes the foundations of an analytical framework to map different innovation pathways and explain how innovation leads to inclusive structural change in low-income countries. Innovation pathways depend on how actors, interactions, and variables affect the origin of innovation; the uptake of the innovations (adoption and diffusion); the impact of this diffusion on upgrading, structural change and inclusion; the complementarity between these processes; the potential trade-offs between structural change and inclusion. The paper offers a set of novel applications to test the proposed framework, through different examples of innovation pathways: (a) international technology transfer, based on an extensive systematic literature review; (b) product and process innovation in the dairy sector in Kenya, based on a secondary case study; (c) an organisational innovation in the provision of antiretroviral treatment in Mozambique, also a case study; (d) a systematisation of metrics and indicators of innovation, structural change and inclusion and an empirical exploration of their relationship. The learning generated will support a multidisciplinary, multi-methods research agenda to map the dynamics around innovation, structural change, and inequality and generate an integrated platform of evidence on these processes. In doing so, we respond to the recently increasing demand coming from international institutions, inter-departmental research funds, NGOs and national ministries, for better knowledge to shape a more effective innovation policy for sustainable and inclusive development in low income countries.

Structural Changes and Growth Regimes

We study the relation between income distribution and growth mediated by structural changes on the demand and supply side. Using results from a multi-sector growth model we compare two growth regimes which differ in three aspects: labour relations, competition, and consumption patterns. Regime one, similar to Fordism, is assumed to be relatively less unequal, more competitive, and with more homogeneous consumers than regime two, similar to post-Fordism. We analyse the parameters that define the two regimes to study the role of exogenous institutional features and endogenous structural features of the economy on output growth, income distribution, and their relation. We find that regime one exhibits significantly lower inequality, higher output and productivity, and lower unemployment than regime two. Both institutional and structural features explain these difference. Most prominent among the first group are wage differences, accompanied by capital income, and the distribution of bonuses to top managers. The concentration of production magnifies the effect of wage differences on income distribution and output growth, suggesting the relevance of the norms of competition. Among structural determinants, particularly relevant are firm organisation and the structure of demand. The way in which final demand distributes across sectors influences competition and overall market concentration. Particularly relevant is the demand of the least wealthy classes. We also show how institutional and structural determinants are tightly linked. Based on this link we conclude by discussing a number of policy implications emerging from our model.