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The origin and nature of meaningful, persistent firm-specific differences is a central issue in the study of business strategy. I investigate in this paper the role of characteristics physically external to firms, but embodied in their local geographic areas, in driving differences in firms’ organizing strategies. Specifically, I examine the extent to which location-specific characteristics affect the organization of pharmaceutical firms’ research laboratories bringing both qualitative and quantitative evidence to bear on this issue. Analyses of the histories of several late 19th century drug makers suggest that differences in local institutions, labor markets, and demand structures played important roles in affecting case firms’ strategic evolution. For example, while Mulford (Philadelphia PA) exploited the strength of nearby universities and the city’s public health system in organizing around leading-edge capabilities in bacteriology, Sterling (Wheeling WV) found that its local environment rewarded investments in marketing and distribution. Panel data analysis on a sample of firms from the late 20th century provides complementary evidence, demonstrating that the scientific orientation of modern drug discovery laboratories is positively and significantly correlated with measures of the strength of the local scientific and technical base. Together, these analyses suggest that location-specific characteristics may be important in driving firm heterogeneity and, ultimately, competitive advantage.

When Brent McBride and Nancy Barbour approached me with a proposal for an Advances in Early Education and Day Care theme volume on child development laboratory schools, I was eager to pursue the topic with them. This Advances series has always been dedicated serving as a forum to furthering the knowledge base on all aspects of early education, broadly defined. The disciplinary roots of the field are necessarily interdisciplinary, reflecting the range of disciplines that are relevant to us, including sociology, psychology, policy studies, curriculum studies, history, and related fields. A fair amount of our existing knowledge base was generated in campus laboratory programs, which were designed to be interdisciplinary, as Barbour shows us in her chapter in this volume. At the same time, I am aware of some of the turmoil and transformation that has shaken campus child development programs over the past two decades (Keyes, 1991); venerable programs have closed, converted from nursery schools to child care, altered to reflect communities beyond the ivory tower of campus, or asked to do things that they had never done in the past. What might a special volume on campus laboratory programs for children tell us about the state of knowledge, and the state of the field of early childhood education and care?

Law enforcement agents enforce rules that they might transgress in their private lives. Building from a theory of “hypocrisy aversion” where agents incur psychological costs from imposing a sanction on others for rules that they might break, the authors design a two-player game in which players are simultaneously placed in the roles of enforcer and potential transgressor. In this model, discretionary enforcement is endogenous to the size of the sanction. Conditional on rewards to enforcement and punishment that are both sufficiently small in the status quo, the authors demonstrate that price effects can be dominated by second-order hypocrisy effects, leading to rates of transgression that increase with larger sanctions. The authors test the model within a laboratory experiment where individuals can simultaneously gamble at the expense of a third party and punish those they observe gambling. Examining the comparable testable predictions of models of (i) selfish agents, (ii) pro-social agents, and (iii) pro-social agents who are averse to hypocrisy, the authors find evidence of hypocrisy aversion in the rates of gambling, sanctioning, and the changing composition of agent strategies. Our results suggest that increasing sanctions can backfire in the deterrence of common criminal and non-criminal offenses.

Purpose – New genetically modified (GM) crops are novel but risky interventions, offering a variety of potential benefits but also the possibility of serious unintended consequences. I address the regulatory framework for GM crops, seeking protection from disproportionate risks without unduly stifling innovation.

Approach – Conditions that may justify precautionary interventions are identified, and an idealized regulatory protocol (screening, pre-release testing, and post-release surveillance, STS) is developed to provide protection, encourage research and learning, and focus-in quickly on the cases that pose serious threats of harm. This protocol is adapted to the case of GM crops, and compared with current regulatory practice in the United States, the EU, and Canada, as well as international agreements exemplified by the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Two real-world cases are considered, Starlink® corn and Roundup-Ready® canola, and some speculations are offered as to how the stylized protocol might have handled them.

Findings for policy – Pre-release, US regulatory practice is more fragmented and incomplete than the stylized protocol; EU practice is more systematic and streamlined, but some critics perceive over-regulation; and Canadian regulatory practice is more consistent with the protocol. Only the EU performs systematic post-release surveillance. International agreements have various weaknesses, beginning with fragmentation: for example, food safety and biosafety are regulated separately.

Implications for further research – Embracing the STS framework opens a broad new avenue of research about to how the mix of pre-release testing and post-release surveillance might be streamlined to provide adequate protection while reducing further the costs and delays entailed.

What roles do trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) play in international technology transfer? Do technologies introduced by multinational firms diffuse to local firms? How does the level of intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection in a country affect its ability to absorb foreign technologies? Using these questions as motivation, this paper surveys the recent trade literature on international technology transfer, paying particular attention to the role of FDI. Several useful conclusions emerge. First, the theoretical literature has shown that trade necessarily encourages growth only if knowledge spillovers are international in scope. Second, existing empirical evidence on the scope of knowledge spillovers (national versus international) is ambiguous. Third, recent empirical plant level studies have called into question earlier studies that argued that FDI has a positive impact on productivity of local firms that compete directly with multinationals. Fourth, there is strong evidence in support of vertical spillovers from FDI: i.e. those firms that either supply multinationals or use goods and services produced by them as intermediate inputs experience productivity gains from such interaction. Fifth, it is well established that the degree of global IPR protection affects the pattern of international trade and convincing evidence that it also influences flows of international technology transfer and FDI has also started to emerge.

In this article, we survey experiments that are directly related to monetary policy and central banking. We argue that experiments can also be used as a tool for central bankers for bench testing policy measures or rules. We distinguish experiments that analyze the reasons for non-neutrality of monetary policy, experiments in which subjects play the role of central bankers, experiments that analyze the role of central bank communication and its implications, experiments on the optimal implementation of monetary policy, and experiments relevant for monetary policy responses to financial crises. Finally, we mention open issues and raise new avenues for future research.

A review of the first year physics laboratory program in 1991 at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) revealed that student laboratory experiences did not: resemble the practice of physicists; give a realistic picture of the contribution of physics to everyday life, or; enhance students’ capabilities of broad value, such as their communication skills. Physics academics at UTS committed themselves to reforming students’ laboratory experiences with inquiry-oriented learning as a center-piece of the reform. This chapter explores the drivers that led to the reconceptualization of the role of the laboratory in the undergraduate curriculum and the strategies and processes we adopted over more than 20 years to embed inquiry-oriented activities into first year physics laboratory programs.

In this chapter, we present our ongoing efforts in developing and sustaining interdisciplinary STEM undergraduate programs at North Carolina A&T State University (NCA&T) – a state-supported HBCU and National Science Foundation (NSF) Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) Institutional Implementation Project grantee. Through three rounds of NSF HBCU-UP implementation grants, a concerted effort has been made in developing interdisciplinary STEM undergraduate research programs in geophysical and environmental science (in round 1), geospatial, computational, and information science (in round 2), and mathematical and computational biology (in round 3) on NCA&T campus. We first present a brief history and background information about the interdisciplinary STEM undergraduate research programs developed and sustained at NCA&T, giving rationales on how these programs had been conceived, and summarizing what have been achieved. Next we give a detailed description on the development of undergraduate research infrastructure including building research facilities through multiple and leveraged funding sources, and engaging a core of committed faculty mentors and research collaborators. We then present, as case studies, some sample interdisciplinary research projects in which STEM undergraduate students were engaged and project outcomes. Successes associated to our endeavor in developing undergraduate research programs as well as challenges and opportunities on implementing and sustaining these efforts are discussed. Finally, we discuss the impact of well-structured undergraduate research training on student success in terms of academic performance, graduation rate and continuing graduate study, and summarize many of the learnings we have gained from implementation and delivery of undergraduate research experiences at HBCUs.

Seeking to build an objective scientific approach to psychiatry, American psychiatrists, physiologists, and psychologists began to turn to the conditional reflex method of Ivan Pavlov from the late 1920s. The generation of “neurotic” animals in the laboratory was critical to the emergence of a new experimental psychiatry in the United States. To understand the development of this field of research, the chapter will draw first on Mary Morgan’s identification of the mediatory and intermediary role of models and their ability to surprise and generate new questions, and second, upon her recent work on narratives in science. It will argue that it was through discursive and descriptive techniques that traced over time the tangled and interconnected lives of experimental subjects, that such elements of unpredictability in the animal laboratory were transformed into tools of research and put to disciplinary uses, promoting the clinical relevance of this new objective approach to psychiatric medicine.