Otto Toivanen
Biographic Data
| ID | 1065597 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Otto Toivanen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Otto |
| FAMILY NAME | Toivanen |
| SIGNATURE | TOIVANEN O |
| AFFILIATIONS | KU Leuven |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 9 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 9 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
A Year Older, A Year Wiser (and Farther from Frontier)
We look at how the arrival of an invention affects wage returns and the probability of moving out of employment for white- and blue-collar co-workers of the inventor. First results suggest that older workers are hurt by the arrival of an invention. This negative effect disappears when we control for education and, in particular, for the time since obtaining the last formal degree, that is, distance to human capital frontier. If anything, this eff…
Klein Lecture Parental Education and Invention
Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the United States but also in Finland, which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45 M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find the following: (i) the positive association between parental income and off‐spring probability of inventing is greatly reduced when controlling for parental education; (ii) instrumenting for the pare…
Heritability of lifetime earnings
Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness
An Anatomy of Cartel Contracts
We study the contracts of 898 legal Finnish cartels. Cartels that exclusively allocate markets, either geographically or in the product/production space, are dominant in manufacturing. They are often bilateral and include a vertical dimension. Structural industry characteristics predict the type of a cartel, e.g., consistent with theory, quota cartels are more common in manufacturing and when buyers are primarily industrial. The contracts of quot…
Public Employees as Politicians
We analyze the effect of municipal employees' political representation in municipal councils on local public spending. We use within-party, as-good-as-random variation in close elections in the Finnish open-list proportional election system to quantify the effect. One more councilor employed by the public sector increases spending by about 1%. The effect comes largely through the largest party and is specific to the employment sector of the munic…
Education and Invention
Modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage. Inventions are created by individuals, raising the question of whether we can increase the number of inventors. To answer this question, we study the causal effect of MSc engineering education on invention, using data on U.S. patents’ Finnish inventors and the distance to the nearest technical university as an instrument. We find a positive effect of engineering education on the propensity …
Estimating the Benefits of Targeted R&D Subsidies
We study the expected welfare effects of targeted R&D subsidies using project-level data from Finland. We model the application and R&D investment decisions of firms and the subsidy-granting decision of the public agency in charge of the program. Our model and institutional environment allow us to identify different benefits and costs of the R&D subsidy program. We find that expected effects of subsidies are very heterogeneous and estimated appli…
Returns to Inventors
A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence, it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are heterogeneous: inventors get a temporary reward of 3% of annual earnings for a patent grant and for highly cited patents a longer-lasting premium of 30% in…
The Economics of Technology and Employment
Journal Article The Economics of Technology and Employment: Theory and Empirical Evidence. Get access The Economics of Technology and Employment: Theory and Empirical Evidence. By Marco Vivarelli. (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1995. Pp. xiii + 184. £49.95 hardback. ISBN 1 85898 166 2.) Otto Toivanen Otto Toivanen Warwick Business School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, V…
Public Employees as Politicians
We analyze the effect of municipal employees' political representation in municipal councils on local public spending. We use within-party, as-good-as-random variation in close elections in the Finnish open-list proportional election system to quantify the effect. One more councilor employed by the public sector increases spending by about 1%. The effect comes largely through the largest party and is specific to the employment sector of the munic…
Heritability of lifetime earnings
Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness
An Anatomy of Cartel Contracts
We study the contracts of 898 legal Finnish cartels. Cartels that exclusively allocate markets, either geographically or in the product/production space, are dominant in manufacturing. They are often bilateral and include a vertical dimension. Structural industry characteristics predict the type of a cartel, e.g., consistent with theory, quota cartels are more common in manufacturing and when buyers are primarily industrial. The contracts of quot…
The Economics of Technology and Employment
Journal Article The Economics of Technology and Employment: Theory and Empirical Evidence. Get access The Economics of Technology and Employment: Theory and Empirical Evidence. By Marco Vivarelli. (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1995. Pp. xiii + 184. £49.95 hardback. ISBN 1 85898 166 2.) Otto Toivanen Otto Toivanen Warwick Business School Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Economic Journal, V…
Returns to Inventors
A key input to inventive activity is human capital. Hence, it is important to understand the monetary incentives of inventors. We estimate the effect of patented inventions on individual earnings by linking data on U.S. patents and their inventors to Finnish employer-employee data. Returns are heterogeneous: inventors get a temporary reward of 3% of annual earnings for a patent grant and for highly cited patents a longer-lasting premium of 30% in…
Estimating the Benefits of Targeted R&D Subsidies
We study the expected welfare effects of targeted R&D subsidies using project-level data from Finland. We model the application and R&D investment decisions of firms and the subsidy-granting decision of the public agency in charge of the program. Our model and institutional environment allow us to identify different benefits and costs of the R&D subsidy program. We find that expected effects of subsidies are very heterogeneous and estimated appli…
Education and Invention
Modern growth theory puts invention on the center stage. Inventions are created by individuals, raising the question of whether we can increase the number of inventors. To answer this question, we study the causal effect of MSc engineering education on invention, using data on U.S. patents’ Finnish inventors and the distance to the nearest technical university as an instrument. We find a positive effect of engineering education on the propensity …
Public Employees as Politicians
We analyze the effect of municipal employees' political representation in municipal councils on local public spending. We use within-party, as-good-as-random variation in close elections in the Finnish open-list proportional election system to quantify the effect. One more councilor employed by the public sector increases spending by about 1%. The effect comes largely through the largest party and is specific to the employment sector of the munic…
Heritability of lifetime earnings
Using twenty years of earnings data on Finnish twins, we find that about 40% of the variance of women’s and little more than half of men’s lifetime labour earnings are linked to genetic factors. The contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We show that the result is robust to using alternative definitions of earnings, to adjusting for the role of education, and to measurement errors in the measure of genetic relatedness
An Anatomy of Cartel Contracts
We study the contracts of 898 legal Finnish cartels. Cartels that exclusively allocate markets, either geographically or in the product/production space, are dominant in manufacturing. They are often bilateral and include a vertical dimension. Structural industry characteristics predict the type of a cartel, e.g., consistent with theory, quota cartels are more common in manufacturing and when buyers are primarily industrial. The contracts of quot…
Klein Lecture Parental Education and Invention
Why is invention strongly positively correlated with parental income not only in the United States but also in Finland, which displays low income inequality and high social mobility? Using data on 1.45 M Finnish individuals and their parents, we find the following: (i) the positive association between parental income and off‐spring probability of inventing is greatly reduced when controlling for parental education; (ii) instrumenting for the pare…
A Year Older, A Year Wiser (and Farther from Frontier)
We look at how the arrival of an invention affects wage returns and the probability of moving out of employment for white- and blue-collar co-workers of the inventor. First results suggest that older workers are hurt by the arrival of an invention. This negative effect disappears when we control for education and, in particular, for the time since obtaining the last formal degree, that is, distance to human capital frontier. If anything, this eff…
Economics (9 works) · Business (4 works) · Innovation Policy and RD (4 works) · Microeconomics (4 works) · Economic Growth and Productivity (3 works) · Firm Innovation and Growth (3 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (3 works) · Labour economics (3 works) · Biology (2 works) · Earnings (2 works)