Constructing an ‘industry’: the case of industrial gases, 1886–2006

Historically minded social scientists who analyse business and industrial development over time – including business historians – often deploy the term ‘industry’ as if its meaning were both self-evident and unchanging through time. This article uses the case of the international industrial gases industry over the course of 12 decades to demonstrate some ways in which a more critical and dynamic view of ‘industry’ – in combination with recognition of the imperfect overlap between firms on the one hand and industries on the other – enables better understanding and analysis of both.     

Wirtschaftlicher Erfolg durch Informationsvorsprung — Unternehmensplanung mittels SAP/R3

Unter Verwendung der Standard-Software SAP R/3 l?sst sich eine integriert ablaufende Unternehmensplanung für ein Unternehmen mit Serienfertigung realisieren.     

Quant GANs: deep generation of financial time series

Modeling financial time series by stochastic processes is a challenging task and a central area of research in financial mathematics. As an alternative, we introduce Quant GANs, a data-driven model which is inspired by the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GANs). Quant GANs consist of a generator and discriminator function, which utilize temporal convolutional networks (TCNs) and thereby achieve to capture long-range dependencies such as the presence of volatility clusters. The generator function is explicitly constructed such that the induced stochastic process allows a transition to its risk-neutral distribution. Our numerical results highlight that distributional properties for small and large lags are in an excellent agreement and dependence properties such as volatility clusters, leverage effects, and serial autocorrelations can be generated by the generator function of Quant GANs, demonstrably in high fidelity.     

60 Years of March and Simon’s Organizations: An Empirical Examination of its Impact and Influence on Subsequent Research

We provide an analytic and systematic review of the impact of March and Simon’s seminal Organizations on management research and discuss the book’s value for current research and propose future applications of it. Building on bibliometric and text‐mining approaches, our empirical analysis reveals that although Organizations was contextually based in the industrial milieu of the 1950s, its concepts have found ongoing resonance with scholars. Further, we find that much of this resonance appears to be driven by the ability of scholars in different ‘schools of thought’ to find useful insights from March and Simon’s generalized theoretical structure. However, we also observe that scholars have been selective in their usage of ideas from the book over the last 60 years. Based our analysis, we propose a particular set of future research areas, including a focus on new organizational forms and extending March and Simon’s ideas to multi‐level research, which can benefit from more holistically drawing on Organizations and connect its original ideas to address current management problems.     

Eriksson on Critical Realism: a rejoinder

Abstract

In this response to Andrew Mearman I argue that his critique suffers from a series of misrepresentations of my paper. For example, Mearman generalizes my arguments about Keynes to be about Critical Realism (CR), and he challenges my criticism of Tony Lawson's arguments by claiming that I have misrepresented CR. In fact the text of my 1998 paper does not support Mearman's claims. Furthermore, since (i) the principal aim of my paper was to question the interpretation of Keynes as a realist, and (ii) Mearman does not present any arguments suggesting how CR in its current form would refute my conclusions, his criticism must be judged doubly misdirected.     

WEIGHTED SMOOTH TRANSITION REGRESSIONS

A new procedure is proposed for modelling nonlinearity of a smooth transition form, by allowing the transition variable to be a weighted function of lagged observations. This function depends on two unknown parameters and requires specification of the maximum lag only. Nonlinearity testing for this specification uses a search over a plausible set of weight function parameters, combined with bootstrap inference. Finite‐sample results show that the recommended wild bootstrap heteroskedasticity‐robust testing procedure performs well, for both homoskedastic and heteroskedastic data‐generating processes. Forecast comparisons relative to linear models and other nonlinear specifications of the smooth transition form confirm that the new WSTR model delivers good performance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Signal of Applying for a Job Under a Vacancy Referral Scheme

We investigate the signalling effect related to participation in active labor‐market programs. To this end, we conduct an experiment in which human resources professionals make hiring decisions concerning fictitious job candidates who apply either under a job‐vacancy referral system or directly. We provide first causal evidence for a substantial adverse effect of referral on the probability of being hired. In addition, we find that employers perceive referred candidates as being less motivated than other candidates.