Knowledge Endowments Research Articles

Sense in sociability? Maternal education, social capital and child schooling in rural Bangladesh

Using detailed micro-data on social relations and networks from rural Bangladesh, this paper examines the social determinants of children's schooling in a developing country. We employ a comprehensive set of controls for parental sociability and NGO membership as proxies for family social capital. We find no evidence that parental sociability bolsters child outcomes as inputs in the educational production function or indirectly via boosting maternal social knowledge, which is an important predictor of children's educational status. On the other hand, the effect of maternal social knowledge prevails even when we additionally control for neighbourhood-level unobservables and maximum education level of the household. To be precise, we find no evidence to suggest that ‘social’ parents are ‘better’ parents: social knowledge endowment of mothers is not related to their sociability. Rather, educated parents and those with higher unobserved taste for child quality have better social knowledge irrespective of thei...

AMCIS 2006 Tutorial Paper: A Review of Methods to Assess National Knowledge in the Knowledge Economy

The evolving role of knowledge in modern societies has spurred an interest in better evaluating knowledge creation capabilities of a variety of business, non-profit, national or multinational actors. Our field has extensively focused on reviewing knowledge management evaluation and implementation programs at the organizational level. In this paper, which stems from a tutorial presented at AMICS 2006 in Acapulco, we focus on the efforts undertaken by International Development Institutions (IDIs) to assess the role of knowledge as a driver of national wealth and economic development. This paper describes methodological frameworks - such as the “knowledge assessments” - used to evaluate a country’s potential to generate new knowledge. Knowledge assessments comprise of qualitative and quantitative exercises to collect benchmarking data on relative national standing in knowledge endowment (the knowledge indexes). The review suggests some open issues and solicits enhancing the predictive capabilities of current models.

Challenges to the growth of Finnish woodworking SMEs

Although Finland has a relatively large number of woodworking SMEs, the challenge is how to create the growth from this endowment of knowledge and experience. Except for economic performance, a few business problems recognised in an eight-country comparison were serious in Finland. The institutional environment for SMEs was considered to be fairly good. National level institutional support was weak, but local, practical SME support was strong. The future success of the Finnish woodworking industries depends on domestic demand. This can be stimulated by changes to planning legislation and building regulations to encourage the building of wooden single-family and wooden apartment houses. The external economies derived from industrial concentrations are not to be found in the Finnish woodworking sector. Such concentrations that currently exist are not expected to develop. This creates a weakness that could affect the sectors' ability to grasp new opportunities.

Space Vs. Networks in the Geography of Innovation: A European Analysis

In the last fifteen years, income differences among European Member States have been strongly narrowing while the process has been matched with a widening of the inter-regional variance within single countries. Traditionally, regional economic disparities in Europe have been ascribed to peripherality and/or to a high level of dependence on declining sectors. Nowadays regional disparities can be no longer defined only in terms of statistical differences in the values of standard macroeconomic indicators, but also according to innovative capacities and knowledge endowment. This paper provides an original framework for the interpretation of the existing relationships between innovation process and research activity in Europe and the structural and geographical features shaping the European scientific and technological map. In order to do so, we focus on two knowledge-based relational phenomena: participation in the same research networks (funded by the EU Fifth Framework Programme) and EPO co-patent applications. Using two complementary econometric techniques we try to assess those factors that determine patenting activity, distinguishing structural features, geographical and relational spillovers. Through these variables we measure the intrinsic relational structure of knowledge flows which directly connects people, institutions and, indirectly, regions, across European countries in order to test whether hierarchical relationships based on a-spatial networks between geographically distant excellence centres prevail over diffusive patterns based on spatial contiguity.

Ethnobotanical knowledge shared widely among Tsimane' Amerindians, Bolivia.

Ethnobotanical knowledge shared widely among Tsimane' Amerindians, Bolivia.

Complémentarités cognitives et production de connaissances nouvelles. Une analyse en termes de réseaux

In this paper the evolution of networks is studied in an environment where innovation takes place as a resuit of agents bringing together their knowledge endowments. Agents freely form pairs that must constitute a stable matching in which the rankings are made on the basis of the innovative ability of any possible pair. Once innovation has taken place the new knowledge generated is allocated to the individuals and the process is iterated. We study the properties of the dynamic network formed by these interactions, and the resultant knowledge dynamics. We find that both the extent to which innovative tasks can be decomposed and the rule for allocating new knowledge to innovative partners are crucially important in determining the properties of the emergent network structure and knowledge profiles.

Abstract representations of numbers in the animal and human brain

There is evidence to suggest that animals, young infants and adult humans possess a biologically determined, domain-specific representation of number and of elementary arithmetic operations. Behavioral studies in infants and animals reveal number perception, discrimination and elementary calculation abilities in non-verbal organisms. Lesion and brain-imaging studies in humans indicate that a specific neural substrate, located in the left and right intraparietal area, is associated with knowledge of numbers and their relations (`number sense'). The number domain is a prime example where strong evidence points to an evolutionary endowment of abstract domain-specific knowledge in the brain because there are parallels between number processing in animals and humans. The numerical distance effect, which refers to the finding that the ability to discriminate between two numbers improves as the numerical distance between them increases, has been demonstrated in humans and animals, as has the number size effect, which refers to the finding that for equal numerical distance, discrimination of two numbers worsens as their numerical size increases.

Productive Performance in West German Manufacturing Industry 1970-80: A Farrell Frontier Characterisation

Some measure of the success with which economic resources are utilised lies at the heart of any meaningful indicator of economic performance. A traditional and obvious point of departure is to say that for a given state of technical knowledge and initial endowments of factor inputs, resource allocation depends on the degree of ability to transform inputs into outputs and the relative returns which these resources can earn. In this paper, the more recent productive performance of the West German manufacturing sector is appraised from one particular viewpoint whilst remaining firmly within what might be called the conventional framework of relating outputs to the factor inputs labour and capital'. Section II provides an initial brief overview of the West German manufacturing sector over the period I 970-80, in which some of the more interesting trends are noted for a more detailed analysis in later sections. Section III sets out the approach used. Again, this is not very extensive given the relatively well documented nature of the methodology. Section IV takes the form of some notes on the data used with a more substantial Section V containing the major analysis. Some more general observations and concluding comments are brought together in a final Section VI.