Research evaluation and journal quality weights

Research evaluations based on quality weighted publication output are often criticized on account of the employed journal quality weights. This study shows that evaluations of entire research organizations are very robust with respect to the choice of readily available weighting schemes. We document this robustness by applying rather different weighting schemes to otherwise identical rankings. Our unit of analysis consists of German, Austrian and Swiss university departments in business administration and economics.     

RANKINGS OF ACADEMIC JOURNALS AND INSTITUTIONS IN ECONOMICS

We conducted a worldwide ranking of academic institutions that produce research in a list of thirty top research journals in economics. We also computed journal rankings for the same period and hence we do not rely on weights that were computed for research carried out in earlier periods. The United States is clearly the dominant force in the top‐fifty group, but European academic institutions are well represented in the group of the top 200 universities worldwide as are universities from Asia and the Far East in particular. (JEL: A14, A10)     

Economic perspectives on leadership: Concepts,causality, and context in leadership research

The fields of leadership and economics have interacted very little until now. The aim of this special issue on “economics and leadership” is to demonstrate the potential benefits of paying attention to and incorporating economic perspectives and methods into leadership research. Specifically, we argue that the field of economics can advance leadership research on three main topics: concepts, causality and context. For each topic, we summarize the state-of-the-art literature and showcase important insights, tools and findings. We also discuss possible critiques of the economic perspective on leadership. The timeliness of this issue is evident from recent discussions on the three C's within the field of leadership research, not least within The Leadership Quarterly itself. Our paper as well as the other six papers in this issue demonstrates that narrowing the gap between economics and leadership is not only beneficial and feasible, but also crucial for the progress of leadership research.     

随机组合风险的风险溢价

随机组合风险在保险索赔理论、金融及经济管理等领域有广泛的应用,数学上采用随机和来刻画随机组合风险。风险溢价在金融经济学及保险经济学的理论中都是很重要的概念,它不仅与风险的大小有关,还与当事人对风险的态度有关,从理论上看就是与当事人的效用函数有关。本文研究在期望效用理论下随机组合风险的风险溢价问题,探讨了由组合数(如索赔次数)的不确定性所引起的风险溢价,给出了几种不同效用函数下随机组合风险的风险溢价的计算公式,并特别针对随机Poisson组合及随机Poisson-Geometric组合给出了其风险溢价的计算公式及性质。     

The Determinants of Retail Productivity: A Critical Review of the Evidence

This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the result of competition/composition effects, planning regulations, information and communications technology, the multinational operation element and workforce skills. Further, the fact that retail firms possess advantages that are transferable between locations suggests that investment in strategies enhancing the transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge between and within businesses are crucial to achieve productivity gains.     

The Assessment of Research Quality in UK Universities: Peer Review or Metrics?

This paper investigates the extent to which the outcomes of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise in the UK, determined by peer review, can be explained by a set of quantitative indicators. Three cognate units of assessment are examined in detail: business and management, economics and econometrics, and accounting and finance. The main finding is that each of the three components of research activity (namely, research output, esteem and research environment) is highly correlated with various quantitative indicators. A further finding is that the judgement of the Research Assessment Exercise panels was biased in favour of Russell Group universities. There is also evidence of bias by the economics and econometrics panel. The results support the use of quantitative indicators in the research assessment process, particularly a journal quality index. Requiring the panels to take bibliometric indicators into account should help not only to reduce the workload of panels but also to mitigate the problem of implicit bias.     

DIVERSITY IN ECONOMICS: AN ANALYSIS OF JOURNAL QUALITY PERCEPTIONS

It is still debatable whether scientific diversity is a virtue or a disadvantage for the development of a discipline. Nonetheless, diversity among scientists with respect to their journal quality perceptions plays an important role in hiring and promotion decisions. In this article we examine the degree of diversity within economics based on the journal quality perceptions of 2,103 AEA economists worldwide. Specifically, we empirically test for factors that might explain differences in an economist's journal quality perceptions. These factors include an economist's geographic origin, school of thought, journal affiliation, field of specialization and research orientation. Indeed, we find that a significant degree of diversity in journal quality perceptions exists between economists that belong in different subgroups. These results might explain the frequent debates in tenure and promotion committees where journal standings are used for the evaluation of a researcher's output. (JEL: A12, D12)     

网络嵌入与个体创造性:关系描述、研究述评及拓展建议

基于网络嵌入的基本概念,从结构嵌入(网络中心性)和关系嵌入(强/弱连带)2个维度入手,系统回顾国外一流管理学期刊和专著中涉及工作群组或组织网络中的结构嵌入、关系嵌入与个体创造性关系的内容,整合其研究框架,归纳总结出不同的研究观点.最后,在此基础上,提出未来的研究方向.     

Reproducibility and replicability crisis: How management compares to psychology and economics – A systematic review of literature

The past decade has been marked by concerns regarding the replicability and reproducibility of published research in the social sciences. Publicized failures to replicate landmark studies, along with high-profile cases of research fraud, have led scholars to reconsider the trustworthiness of both findings and institutionalized research practices. This paper considers two questions: (1) Relative to psychology and economics, what is the state of replication and reproduction research in management? (2) Are the disciplines equally advanced in the use of methods applied to study the replication problem? A systematic literature review identified 67 studies pertinent to these questions. The results indicate that the replication prevalence rate in management studies lies almost exactly between those of psychology and economics, while a high level of variation between management and other business-related disciplines can be noted. Further, similarly to psychology, but unlike economics, the surveys of published replications tend to report high replication success rates for management and other business-related disciplines. However, a comparison with recently obtained results in preregistered multi-study replications in psychology and economics suggests that these rates are almost certainly inflated. Method and data transparency are medium to low, often rendering attempts to reproduce or replicate studies impossible. Finally, the understanding of the replicability problem in management is held back by the underutilization of methods developed in other disciplines. The review also reveals that management, psychology, and economics exhibit strikingly different practices and approaches to replication, despite facing similar incentive structures. Disciplines in which replication and reproduction attempts are rare and which frequently involve authors of the original study in replication attempts lack strong deterrents against questionable research practices; thus, they are less likely to deliver replicable results.     

The Regime of Excellence and the Erosion of Ethos in Critical Management Studies

The regime of excellence – manifested in journal rankings and research assessments – is coming to increasing prominence in the contemporary university. Critical scholars have responded to the encroaching ideology of excellence in various ways: while some seek to defend such measures of academic performance on the grounds that they provide accountability and transparency in place of elitism and privilege, others have criticized their impact on scholarship. The present paper contributes to the debate by exploring the relationship between the regime of excellence and critical management studies (CMS). Drawing on extensive interviews with CMS professors, we show how the regime of excellence is eroding the ethos of critical scholars. As a result, decisions about what to research and where to publish are increasingly being made according to the diktats of research assessments, journal rankings and managing editors of premier outlets. This suggests that CMS researchers may find themselves inadvertently aiding and abetting the rise of managerialism in the university sector, which raises troubling questions about the future of critical scholarship in the business school.     

Forecasting the market demand for waste paper

In a recent article in this journal, Livesey and Barcena supplied an interesting but necessarily superficial analysis of the market for waste paper. Their essential conclusion was that, faced with future shortages, and hence increased prices of wood pulp, the paper and board industry would be forced to rely more heavily on secondary fibre. In turn, they felt that ‘in order to ensure an adequate supply of waste paper, governments may need to exert a greater degree of influence over the market than they do at present’.This paper seeks to provide a more rigorous analysis of the ‘waste paper problem’ in terms of future demand and fluctuations in that demand. It also corrects some misconceptions in the paper by Livesey and Barcena as to the likely sources of future supply and the economics of securing those supplies.     

Notes and Communications APPLICATIONS OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE IN BANKING

This paper identifies and classifies 164 journal articles on management science in banking according to technique and application area. An analysis provides some interesting insights into historical trends and future prospects for research.     

The Choice of Governance Modes of International Franchise Firms — Development of an Integrative Model

This paper examines the evolution of the international franchise research with special focus on the governance modes of the international franchise firm and develops a new model for the franchisor's choice of the international governance modes. International governance modes in franchising refer to wholly-owned subsidiaries, joint venture franchising, area development franchising and master franchising. Although many studies on the governance modes of the international franchise firm have been published in the last two decades, no prior study develops an integrative framework that investigates the determinants of the international governance modes by combining organizational economics and strategic management perspectives. Specifically, this study explains the governance modes of the international franchise firm by applying transaction cost theory, agency theory, resource-based and organizational capabilities theory and property rights theory.     

企业产品创新的扩散与采纳者的行为决策模式研究

在SIR模型基础上,根据信息经济学理论从个体层面研究了产品创新扩散过程中采纳者行为决策的决定因子及其行为选择方式,同时得出了一些促进产品创新扩散的重要结论.     

Workforce Age and Innovation: A Literature Survey

The relationship between age and creative performance has been found to follow a hump‐shaped profile in the arts and sciences, and in great technological achievement. Accordingly, accelerating workforce aging raises concern about whether future capacity to innovate is endangered. This paper provides a literature survey and critical discussion of existing studies exploring the effects of age on innovative performance, both at the individual and the firm level. However, as individual‐level evidence and some of the firm‐level studies are of purely cross‐sectional nature, the existing results have to be interpreted with caution owing to the presence of selectivity biases and unobserved heterogeneity. Studies at the aggregate level of firms address some of these issues. In particular, the scarce longitudinal evidence reveals that it is very likely that older workers fare much better in innovation than previous cross‐sectional evidence suggests. Moreover, up to now, the literature survey does not find conclusive evidence that a youth‐centred human resource strategy (always) fosters innovation. Apart from integrating the existing empirical evidence on different levels of aggregation, a strong focus of this paper is on methodological challenges in the empirical study of workforce age and innovation and it aims to offer a sound conceptual and methodological basis for further studies in this field of management research.     

Economics and quantitative economics: A defence

The purpose of the paper is to discuss quantitative work in economics, especially in relation to problems of macro-economic policy. It is argued that many recent criticisms of economics are not well founded, and it is certainly not the case that what is wrong with economics is its quantitative bias. Quite the contrary; in a number of areas more quantitative work is required. The use of control theory methods should be welcomed by economists, but these need not be introduced to the exclusion of other methods. Finally, some suggestions are made for further research.     

Short-Run Wage Flexibility and Labour Market Adaptation in Western Europe

ABSTRACT: This paper starts by reviewing some of the evidence relating to movements in relative wages, asking what have been their causes and whether they serve to allocate labour across labour markets. Much of the research has tended to focus on the statistical sources available, and therefore to focus on movements of pay between industries rather than firms, between occupations, and between workers with different levels of qualification. This has greatly constrained the possibility of linking these different dimensions to look at the ideal question, namely to what extent do relative wages respond to labour supply and demand pressures, and to what extent do they help to reconcile these two pressures. In addition, evidence from studies based on data obtained from individual firms also broadly supports the view that wage differentials are not very responsive to supply and demand pressures, and also that they are mostly not very effective in promoting the adaptation of labour supply and demand across labour markets. The paper ends by considering briefly some recent policy ideas for increasing the responsiveness of relative wages to demand changes.     

Reducing differences between profiles of weights: A “peer-restricted” cross-efficiency evaluation

This paper deals with the selection of the profiles of weights to be used in cross-efficiency evaluations. In an attempt to prevent unrealistic weighting schemes, one of the issues of main interest that we address here is that of the zero weights, since their use implies that some of the variables considered are excluded from the assessments to be made. In the calculation of cross-efficiency scores, we propose to ignore the profiles of weights of the DMUs that cannot make a choice of non-zero weights among their alternate optima. The different units are therefore assessed in a peer-evaluation that does not consider the profiles of weights of some inefficient DMUs. This approach is referred to as “peer-restricted” cross-efficiency evaluation. Aside from avoiding zero weights, the choice of weights that we make also seeks to reduce the differences between the weights profiles selected as much as possible. Thus, in the “peer-restricted” cross-efficiency evaluation in the present paper we also try to avoid that the different DMUs attach very different weights to the same variable. Finally, we extend this approach to derive a common set of weights by exploiting the idea of similarity between profiles of weights.