On Stephen Parsons' Philosophical Critique of Transcendental Realism

This paper replies to Stephen Parsons' critique of Tony Lawson's Economics and Reality recently published in this journal. The topics addressed include Lawson's critique of empirical realism; Lawson's definition of 'structures'; theories of truth; the relationship between mainstream economics and empirical realism; and the possibility of naturalism .     

Information,Knowledge and Agency: The Information Theoretic Approach and the Austrians

Both the Information Theoretic Economics and Austrian Economics investigate the impact on market activity of problems of information and knowledge. The conceptions of information and knowledge they employ, however, as well as their respective views on and treatment of economic agency, are quite different. The purpose of this paper is to examine these differences, not primarily from an abstract philosophical point of view, but by looking at substantive examples of the economics offered by the two approaches. An attempt is made to explain the Austrian preference for non-formalist approaches to economic analysis.     

Country-level Accounting Enforcement and IPO Underpricing

Using a sample of up to 2,503 initial public offerings (IPOs) in 32 countries from 2011–2017, we predict and find that higher levels of country-level accounting enforcement are associated with lower levels of IPO underpricing. IPOs in countries with a relatively low accounting enforcement score (second quintile) exhibit a mean underpricing of 19%, whereas the mean underpricing amounts to just 9% in countries with a relatively high score (fourth quintile). The results remain qualitatively the same when we employ a multi-level model or a difference-in-difference design. In countries that substantially strengthened their accounting enforcement in the 2003–2009 period, the level of IPO underpricing decreased significantly. We show that accounting enforcement matters for the cost of going public.     

Campaign dynamics of cognitive accessibility of political judgments: measuring the impact of campaigns and campaign events using response latencies in two German rolling cross section studies

Do campaigns matter? Based on two rolling cross-section computer-assisted telephone surveys conducted in the run-up to the 2009 and 2013 German Federal Election, we test whether we can detect campaign effects on the accessibility of voters’ judgments: how do response latencies of political judgments evolve over the course of campaigns? The study uses response latencies, i.e. the standardized time it takes respondents to answer a survey question, as a proxy measurement of cognitive accessibility of political judgments. If campaigns do help voters to make up their minds, we should be able to observe changes at the implicit level of response latencies. Do people answer questions about their voting behavior and political attitudes faster as Election Day comes closer? Our results suggest that attitudes towards candidates and voting intentions become more cognitively accessible during campaigns whereas the accessibility of party identification is conditional on the contextual features of campaigns. In addition we find specific short-term effects of TV debates.     

Networks and network resources in technological innovation systems: Towards a conceptual framework for system building

Previous research has shown that formal networks can play a crucial role in the formation of technological innovation systems (TIS). Firms and other actors collaborate in formal networks not only to generate new knowledge but also to strategically create and shape supportive system resources such as technology specific R&D programs. This paper takes a closer look at the resources, which are developed and deployed by networks to facilitate the building up of a TIS. Networks rely not only on the organizational resources of their members but also on new resources developed at the network level including network governance structures, trust among network members, a common understanding of the strategic goals or a good reputation of the network. Our analysis shows that the capacity of networks to fulfill different tasks of system building especially depends on the network resources they are able to establish. With the differentiation of organizational, network and system resources we introduce a conceptual framework, which makes three important contributions. It highlights the strategic nature of (innovation) system building; it allows us comparing the contribution of different actors and formal networks in this regard; and it improves our understanding of how firm and system level processes are intertwined.     

Relative concerns of rural-to-urban migrants in China

As their environment changes, migrants constitute an interesting group to study the effect of relative income on subjective well-being. This paper focuses on the huge population of rural-to-urban migrants in China. Using a novel dataset, we find that the well-being of migrants depends on several reference groups: it is negatively affected by the income of other migrants and workers of home regions; in contrast, we identify a positive, ‘signal’ effect vis-à-vis urban workers: larger urban incomes indicate higher income prospects for the migrants. These effects are particularly strong for migrants who wish to settle permanently, decline with years since migrations and change with other characteristics including work conditions and community ties.