A National Plan for the Chemical Industry in Israel
The National Plan for the Chemical Industry in Israel is a large project that the Samuel Neaman Institute has been leading since 2004. The project analyzes past and present chemistry and pharmaceutical branches produced in Israel, present alternatives and demonstrates new industry branches in this field. This project compares this industry with other global markets […]
Harnessing Success: Determinants of University Technology Licensing Performance STE-WP-35
We study the impact of incentive pay, local development objectives and government constraints on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model technology licensing offices, using new survey information combined with panel data on 86 U.S. universities for the period 1995-99. We find that private universities are much more likely to adopt […]
KNOWLEDGE-INTENSIVE PROPERTY RIGHTS (STE-WP-39)
Venture capitalism is a major institutional innovation based on identifying economies of scope in transactions of technological knowledge, bundled with managerial competence, reputation, screening procedures and equity. It has paved the way to the emergence of new surrogate markets for knowledge, i.e. financial markets specialized in trading knowledge-intensive property rights. This development has important benefits […]
The Limits of Capital: Transcending the Public Financer – Private Producer Split in R&D (STE-WP-40)
Despite a strong tendency in the privatization literature to prefer private sector solutions to public sector ones, in the case of R&D a near consensus has emerged that supports public R&D funding for private production as a solution to a host of market failures. This article explores theoretical justifications for a more expansive role for […]
The quality of Israeli academic institutions: what the wages of graduates tell about it?
Higher education in Israel expanded rapidly in the last ten years with the opening of academic colleges. This study examines the return on education, in terms of salaries, of first degree graduates from colleges compared with that of university graduates, controlling for cognitive abilities and socioeconomic characteristics. The use of Propensity Score Matching shows that […]
Equity and Efficiency Effects of Different Funding Arrangements for Higher Education: A Calibrated Analysis Applied to Israel
We construct a macro-model of an economy with skilled and unskilled labor, and a centralized system of higher education, calibrate it to the parameters of Israel’s economy and university system, and then use it to simulate different modes of financing higher education so as to gauge their effect on output, distribution and mobility. We find […]
The Possible Role Of Israeli Solar Technologies In The Meadowlands’ Renewable Energy Efforts
The SNI was asked by the NJ Meadowlands Commission (NJMC)- renewable energy task force, the Institute for Meadowlands Studies (IMS) and the Center for Energy, Economic and Environmental Policy to pinpoint Israeli companies, which are capable of participating in solar energy tenders at NJ, Meadowlands. The current report examines Israeli companies in the […]
Energy efficiency in Ein Harod Ihud
The work was prepared as part of the Ein Harod Echud project – Kibbutz Yerok. The purpose of the work was to examine ways to save/reduce energy costs in the group and to propose cost-saving measures that include the use of alternative energies, while meeting the criteria of economic viability. The initial report focused on […]
Investment Policies in Defense R&D Programs
Investment in advanced defense technologies is a prominent characteristic of modern armed forces. The paper examines the optimal investment policy in developing such technologies, accounting for their S-shaped progress profile and the stochastic nature of the R&D process. We show that the optimal investment is a discontinuous function of the available budget, and that its […]
Reclaiming the Dead Sea, Alternatives for Action
The Dead Sea, the lowest and saltiest sea in the world, is currently in a state of severe environmental degradation. Water extraction from the Jordan River, the Sea of Galilee, and the Yarmouk River for Israel, Jordan, and Syria, as well as the extraction of Dead Sea water for industrial plants in Israel and Jordan, […]
