Technology Transfer and Public Policy

This article uses events occurring between 1989 and 1994 at the University of California (UC) as a case study to illustrate the consequences to the university of the collision between two powerful public policy agendas for the university: (a) that it maintain its traditional independence, carrying out its roles of teaching and research untainted by the lures and demands of the marketplace, and (b) that it become more active in economic development activities, including the development and sale of its intellectual property and the establishment of companies to exploit university research. The unsuccessful attempts over these five years by the UC to establish a separate nonprofit foundation to manage its considerable portfolio of intellectual property and to form a for-profit company to fund development and start-up efforts have been plagued with controversy. UC's story offers parallels with the experiences of other universities and illustrates an emerging pattern in the responses of higher education to the new pressures on them to be more economically relevant. The lessons from the UC case are valuable for other universities and for policymakers involved in technology transfer activities.     

LONG-TERM FORECASTING OF NONCOINTEGRATED AND COINTEGRATED REGIONAL AND NATIONAL MODELS*

ABSTRACT. Johansen's (1988) multivariate test for cointegration is first applied to four models involving quarterly state data and five variables, along with a national model based on Friedman and Kuttner's (1992) model of money demand, which uses three variables. Each regional model consists of frequently used national and state series, for which theory suggests the possible cointegration of several series pairs. Beginning with all five series, however, one state model is found to be cointegrated over each of 20 successive estimation intervals. The money demand model and one state model are not cointegrated over the same intervals. In the cointegrated case, five-year experimental forecasts show that error correction mechanism (ECM) and Bayesian ECM models outperform all other approaches. More importantly, forecasting performance improves further by respecifying the ECM model based on three cointegrated series pairs rather than the five-component cointegrating vector. For the two noncointegrated systems, the first-difference model suggested by the cointegration/ error correction literature is far superior to VAR in levels over both shortand long-term horizons.     

Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations

Abstract. This article considers the debate that has recently developed in studies of nationalism between those scholars who see the nation as a modern and constantly changing construction ex nihilo and those who see it as an immemorial, unchanging communal essence. It outlines the so-called ‘gastronomical’ and ‘geological’ metaphors of nation formation and suggests a synthetic model which balances the influence of the ethnic past and the impact of nationalist activity. It shows that the central question which has divided theorists of nationalism is the place of the past in the life of modern nations. The author recognises the role of nationalists in national mobilisation but stresses that nationalists are not social engineers or mere image makers as modernist and post-modernist accounts would have it, but rather social and political archaeologists whose activities consist in the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the ethnic past and through it the regeneration of their national community.     

Gravity-Type Interactive Markov Models—Part II: Lyapunov Stability of Steady States

In Part I of this paper (Smith and Hsieh, 1997) a programming formulation of steady states was developed for gravity-type interactive Markov chains in terms of their associated spatial-flow chains. These results are here applied to analyze the stability properties of interactive Markov chains. In particular, the objective function for this programming formulation is shown to constitute a Lyapunov function for an appropriately defined continuous-time version of spatial-flow chains. The Lyapunov stability properties of these spatial flows are then shown to yield corresponding stability properties for the continuous-time versions of interactive Markov chains. In particular, these processes always exhibit global convergence to steady states. Finally, it is shown that when steady states are unique, these convergence results are inherited by those interactive Markov chains that are 'sufficiently close' to their continuous-time versions.