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This note describes a new database on innovative start-ups and companies, called Crunchbase, with a focus on its potential for economic and managerial research. Crunchbase is rapidly being discovered by scholars from different fields. It has notably already informed studies on specific sectors as well as studies of networks in the start-up ecosystem. This note first describes the contents of Crunchbase and then reviews academic research that has used it. We further suggest that many more valuable avenues for economic and managerial research can be opened through the combination of Crunchbase with selected supplementary data sources and provide two such examples.

This paper focusses on the link between urbanisation and consumption behaviour in China. Urbanisation is defined here as rural people moving to cities to work and migrant workers in cities obtaining urban residential status, against the backdrop of government plans to settle 100 million rural dwellers into cities and grant urban residential status to another 100 million migrant workers who already reside in cities. Using household data of the China Family Panel Studies dataset, the paper investigates the impact of those residential status changes on household consumption. The results of the analysis suggest that moving up the residential ladder in this way will likely result in increased consumption by almost 30% for both groups of people and thus contribute to rebalancing of the economy. Higher incomes and longer times in education are important drivers of this process, while a greater number of children in the family discourages consumption.
This Working Paper relates to the 2017 OECD Economic Survey of China (www.oecd.org/eco/surveys/economic-survey-china.htm).

Gender is one of the key socio-demographic variables that can influence travel behaviour, but it is often the least understood. Understanding travel behaviour by gender will help better design transport policies that are efficient and equitable. Due to the gendered division of work in households, women often have multiple tasks and activities. As a result, women are more likely to have shorter commute distances, to chain trips, to have more non-work related trips, to travel at off-peak hours, and to choose more flexible modes. This study examines travel behaviour by gender in eight different cities, across three different continents, focusing on transport mode, trip purpose, travel distance and departure time for Auckland, Dublin, Hanoi, Helsinki, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Lisbon and Manila. The most common trends found in the cities are that women tend to travel shorter distances and prefer public transport and taxi services to cars more than men.

Pedagogy is at the heart of teaching and learning. Preparing young people to meet new contemporary challenges means to review and update the pedagogies teachers use. However, despite the increased reporting of teachers and schools that are innovating, schools remain largely seen as very resistant places for innovation. To address the importance and challenges of implementing new pedagogies, this paper brings together leading experts to reflect on key areas of pedagogy. In particular, each chapter addresses a pedagogical dimension that together offers a conceptual framework for action. This framework moves beyond a fragmented focus on specific innovations. In doing so, it helps explain how innovative pedagogies may be developed, applied and scaled. Amelia Peterson’s first contribution shows how fundamental purpose is to pedagogy, while Hanna Dumont’s section explores adaptive teaching as a cross-cutting concept over a range of different pedagogical approaches. Then the paper moves to discuss the importance of understanding pedagogies as combinations, which Amelia Peterson defines as two layers: one combining discrete teaching practices and another that combines approaches to meet long-term educational goals. Marc Lafuente looks first at content domains (mathematics, non-native languages, and socio-emotional learning) and how they relate to pedagogies. He then contributes to the thinking on “new learners” and technology, as important context influencing pedagogical choices and implementation. The final section by Nancy Law is focused on change, through the particular prism of technology-enhanced pedagogical innovations. Her analysis moves towards a theory of change that takes account of the need for alignment at the different levels of the educational system.

This paper shows that corporate tax provisions can lead to different effective tax rates (ETRs) if there is a capital cost-intensive and a variable cost-intensive way of producing the same output. It develops a framework for analysing sources of the difference in ETRs and adapts existing models to compare forward-looking ETRs for low-carbon and high-carbon electricity generation technologies, considering tax provisions for cost recovery in 36 countries. It finds that standard tax systems are technology neutral when investments are debt-financed because the deductibility of interest payments compensates for the fact that capital allowances are based on nominal (rather than real) capital costs. Under equity finance, ETRs are higher for investments in capital-cost-intensive technologies as the cost of equity finance is often not deductible. Since low-carbon electricity generation tends to be relatively capital-intensive, this result represents a form of unintentional misalignment of the corporate tax system with decarbonisation objectives,.

This paper highlights the necessity of a spatial approach to addressing the acceptability problem of road tolls in cities. Few cities have implemented urban congestion charges because of limited public acceptance and perceived distributive impacts. The report focuses on the space consumption of car traffic as opposed to on time losses from road congestion. It shows that by focusing on accessibility, user groups who would be most adversely affected by tolls can be identified and the effectiveness of mitigation measures tested.

We examine the relationship between lax monetary policy, access to high-yield bond markets and productivity in the US between 2008 and 2016. Using monetary policy surprises, obtained from changes in interest rates futures in narrow windows around FOMC announcements, we isolate the increased access to high-yield bond markets relative to investment-grade bond markets that is due to unconventional monetary policy (UMP). We find that through the risk-taking channel, UMP has increased investors’ appetite for high-yield US corporate bonds, thereby increasing access to high-yield bond markets for firms with a higher risk profile. Since the relationship between credit ratings and firm-level productivity is U-shaped, the aggregate effect on productivity is a priori unclear. Turning to the real economy, we thus analyse whether this additional access to finance had an effect on aggregate productivity by altering the reallocation of resources across firms. Our results show that unconventional monetary policy induced less investment in tangible capital by high-productive firms. However, before drawing conclusions on the net effects of UMP on aggregate productivity, we discuss a number of issues that this paper could not deal with due to data limitations, including prominently whether this apparent misallocation may have been offset by a shift in the composition of investments towards more intangible investment.

Starting from a low level in early 2000s, Turkey’s total capital stock has since expanded rapidly, but the composition and quality of investment raises questions. This study focuses on business investment, as the main driver of physical and knowledge-based capital formation and, hence, of potential output and the material foundations of well-being. Micro data allow to distinguish four types of firms: small businesses with a high rate of informality, medium-sized family firms, large formal corporations, and skilled start-ups. The relative importance of the challenges facing these different types of firms varies, notably with respect to skill shortcomings, regulatory burdens, labour costs, access to bank lending, over-leveraging and scarce equity capital. Improving the current business environment and overcoming the fragmentation of the business sector will be crucial to upgrade the quality of business investment and to enhance the allocative efficiency of capital formation. This calls for promoting formality, best management practices, the build-up of equity capital, access to long-term bank financing and other market-based financing that can complement traditional bank lending; and a faster and more inclusive transition to the digital economy.

Digitalisation is having a profound impact on social and economic activity. While often benefiting from a very long history of public investment in R&D, digitalisation has been largely driven by the private sector. However, the combined adoption of new digital technologies, increased reliance upon new data sources, and use of advanced analytic methods hold significant potential to: i) improve the effectiveness and enforcement of public policies; ii) enable innovative policy design and impact evaluation, and; iii) expand citizen and stakeholder engagement in policy making and implementation. These benefits are likely to be greatest in policy domains where outcomes are only observable at significant cost and/or where there is significant heteroregeneity in responses across different agents. In this paper we provide a review of initiatives across a number of fields including: competition, education, environment, innovation, and taxation.

This paper updates analyses of the relationship between fluctuations of the business cycle and the number of traffic fatalities published in 2015 by the International Transport Forum. Since then, the global recession that started in 2008 has ended and economic growth has returned to most International Transport Forum countries. The paper revisits the affect that declining or stable high rates of unemployment have on traffic fatalities.

Macroeconomic forecasters typically forecast fewer recessions than the number experienced, which means economic growth tends to be over-predicted on average. Consequently, forecast errors are not normally distributed, making it difficult to convey the uncertainty and risks based on the historical forecast track record. To characterise this risk, recent OECD work constructed fan charts parameterised on historical forecast errors and the probability of a future downturn estimated from a probit model comprising a range of potential macroeconomic and financial early warning indicators. As the probability of a downturn increases the associated fan chart is wider, reflecting increased uncertainty, and more skewed to the downside, reflecting greater downside risks. This paper applies this methodology to New Zealand; although one important difference compared to other OECD economies is that the time span of macroeconomic data without major structural change is significantly shorter. Forecast errors for GDP by the OECD, Reserve Bank of New Zealand and New Zealand Treasury all appear to be non-normally distributed. Fan charts for GDP forecasts from the mid-year 2018 OECD Economic Outlook are symmetric due to the low probability of a downturn. Fan charts estimated for the period preceding the global financial crisis using currently-available data have a downwards skew. However, those estimated using data only available in the lead up to the crisis have many insignificant coefficients, likely due to the structural changes that have occurred in the New Zealand economy since the 1980s.

This paper explains the rationale for updating the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2021 questionnaire on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and shows how it covers policy topics of current relevance. After presenting key findings based on previous ICT-related PISA data, the paper provides a summary of the PISA 2021 ICT framework guiding the development of the questionnaire. The paper then describes the process followed by the OECD/PISA secretariat for the development of the PISA 2021 ICT questionnaire items. The paper concludes by drawing some lessons that would inform future development of this instrument.

This paper takes stock of recent developments related to online consumer ratings and reviews and their effects on consumer behaviour. It provides an overview of key consumer benefits and risks associated with user-generated feedback, and identifies consumer policy challenges, including misleading and deceptive practices, a lack of accuracy, and consumer biases. It also points to issues for further consideration by consumer policy makers and enforcement authorities, as well as businesses and consumer organisations.

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), used computers as the main assessment deliver platform. This enabled the Programme to collect data not only on whether respondents were able to solve specific tasks, but also on how they approached the problems at hand and how much time they spent on them. This paper draws on this information to characterise individuals’ problem-solving strategies using the longest common subsequence (LCS) method, a sequence-mining technique commonly used in natural language processing and biostatistics. The LCS is used to compare the action sequences followed by PIAAC respondents to a set of “optimal” predefined sequences identified by test developers and subject matter experts. This approach allows studying problem-solving behaviours across multiple assessment items.

This paper examines how the increase in under-employment since the financial crisis stems from both cyclical and structural factors, notably the gradual shift of employment toward more demand-driven service sectors. The increase in under-employment has disproportionately affected young, female and low-skilled workers, meaning that they face lower wage growth, particularly at the bottom of the income distribution.

This report presents a model that helps to better understand how consumers in France choose their cars. It presents the results for different scenarios for the future development of the French vehicle fleet and projections for related CO2 emissions to 2050. The model distinguishes conventional, plug-in hybrid, battery-electric and fuel cell cars. It looks at the privately-owned as well as company car fleets and considers non-monetary factors for vehicle choice. Among these are personal preferences, the availability of recharging infrastructure for electric vehicles, and policy incentives such as subsidies or preferential vehicle use rights. The methodology and the data used for this new passenger car fleet model are described in detail.

Today, AI technologies and tools play a key role in every aspect of the COVID-19 crisis response. To help facilitate the use of AI throughout the crisis, policy makers should encourage the sharing of medical, molecular, and scientific datasets and models on collaborative platforms to help AI researchers build effective tools for the medical community, and should ensure that researchers have access to the necessary computing capacity. To realise the full promise of AI to combat COVID-19, policy makers must ensure that AI systems are trustworthy and aligned with the OECD AI Principles.