Assessing Cumulative Evidence within ‘Macro’ Research: Why Meta‐Analysis Should be Preferred Over Vote Counting

Understanding the conclusions a body of evidence offers involves accumulating findings. Two recent articles used vote counting to assess the evidence related to important macro theories: transaction cost theory and resource‐based theory. Each concluded that its focal theory is not well supported. In contrast, recent meta‐analyses of the same theories concluded that both are strongly supported. We explain why macro researchers should trust the findings of meta‐analyses but not those of vote counts. A direct implication is that researchers interested in advancing transaction cost and resource‐based theories need to build upon the meta‐analytic evidence. A broader implication is that, as the preferred method for accumulating evidence, meta‐analysis can be a catalyst for the re‐evaluation of established theories and the development of new theory.     

Pressure group power in the European Community

The renewed attention to the strengthening of the internal market of the European Community heralded by the Single European Act of 1986 is likely to produce a quantum leap in pressure group activity in Brussels, as business interests line up to exert their influence on the many harmonisation measures that are in the pipeline. How great an influence have European pressure groups exerted up till now? In what spheres has this influence been felt most strongly?     

Investment portfolio balancing: application of a generic self-organizing fuzzy neural network (GenSoFNN)

In contrast to short-term stock trading, portfolio managers are interested in the medium- to long-term peaks and troughs of the stock price cycles as signals to balance their stock portfolios – the predicted trough is the signal to buy the stock and the predicted peak is the signal to sell the stock. As statistical models are generally inadequate or incapable of providing such portfolio balancing signals, we propose using the generic self-organizing fuzzy neural network (GenSoFNN)—a fuzzy neural system – as a tool for portfolio balancing. The network adopts the supervised learning approach to detect inflection points in the stock price cycles, and a modified locally weighted regression algorithm is employed to smooth the stock cycles. The GenSoFNN-based portfolio balancing system was evaluated with experiments conducted using 23 stocks from the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ, and the results showed an average profit return of 65.66%. The contributions of the proposed GenSoFNN intelligent portfolio balancing system are twofold: it can be used as an efficient trading solution and it can provide decision support in trading via its generated rules. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Subsidizing Charitable Giving with Rebates or Matching: Further Laboratory Evidence

We examine two different ways to subsidize charitable giving: by a rebate (returning a portion of the donation to the giver) or by a match (adding additional donations to the giver's donation). In previous experimental research, we have shown that participants give more to charity under the match than under an equivalent rebate. The previous within-subject experimental design required participants to make a series of decisions under both types of subsidy. Each decision consisted of an allocation of an endowment between the subject and a charity chosen by the subject from a specified list. This article examines whether that result is an artifact of the previous within-subjects design: subjects may have failed to fully distinguish the two types of subsidy. In the current article, we report results from a between-subjects design, where participants are required to make only one type of decision—involving rebates or involving matching subsidies. Our results confirm previous findings.     

Aqui No Se Habla Agencia.* An Examination of the Impact of Adverse Selection and Framing in Decision‐Making: a US/Mexico Comparison

US companies seeking cheaper labor or extraordinary returns have often seen foreign direct investment as a panacea. However, many of these companies founder on the horns of a control dilemma. While raw economic data such as labor rates prove to be true, productivity and decision‐making styles are so different that companies fail to maximize their investment returns. This situation is worsened as companies attempt to impose culturally inappropriate home country controls on their foreign investment. This study examines one of the potential sources of failure, escalation of commitment, which occurs when decision‐makers over‐commit incremental resources to failing investments without reasonable probability of recovery. This behavior has been widely documented in US domestic literature (see Whyte and Hook, 1997 , for a summary). However, there is also some evidence that such behavior is culturally bounded ( Chow et al., 1997; Sharp and Salter, 1997; Greer and Stephens, 2001 ). This study extends previous findings on cross‐cultural differences in decision‐making among managers by comparing the responses of managers in the USA and Mexico to an escalation of commitment exercise. The cross‐cultural validity of two US based theories, agency (adverse selection) and framing (prospect theory), is tested. The results indicate that at base Mexican managers were more risk seeking. However managers from the more individualistic USA were significantly more likely than Mexican managers to escalate in the presence of agency (adverse selection) based incentives. Negative framing among managers was universal in escalating commitment.     

Reflexive Interdisciplinary Research: The Making of a Research Programme on the Rural Economy and Land Use

This paper provides an account of the origins and formation of the UK Research Councils’ Rural Economy and Land Use (RELU) programme and its approach to promoting interdisciplinary working between social and natural scientists. The programme is set in the context of broader developments in science policy, including a policy discourse centred upon sustainable development and the knowledge economy and associated demands for greater accountability in science. Interdisciplinarity promises research that will be more relevant and responsive to public needs and concerns. In describing the provenance of the RELU programme, therefore, the paper seeks to lay out the different stages in its initiation and design to show how, to varying degrees, these were open to external scrutiny and influence. The process of developing the programme illustrates that it is not straightforward to make research agendas and funding more transparent and accountable. It also provides insights into the challenges that interdisciplinarity and accountability present to established science institutions.     

Fifty years since Koyck (1954)*

This paper shows that Koyck (1954)’s PhD thesis amounts to one of the very important innovations in econometrics. The model and the associated transformation are still used in classrooms and in academic articles. His book is one of the most often cited econometrics publications of the 1950s, and still receives its share of citations. It remains a source of inspiration for present‐day researchers. To sum up, it amounts to one of the most influential Dutch publications on econometrics.     

A multi‐level panel STAR model for US manufacturing sectors

We introduce a multi‐level smooth transition model for a panel of time series, which can be used to examine the presence of common nonlinear business cycle features across many variables. The model is positioned in between a fully pooled model, which imposes such common features, and a fully heterogeneous model, which allows for unrestricted nonlinearity. We introduce a second‐stage model linking the parameters that determine the timing of the switches between business cycle regimes to observable explanatory variables, thereby allowing for lead–lag relationships across panel members. We discuss representation, estimation by concentrated simulated maximum likelihood and inference. We illustrate our model using quarterly industrial production in 19 US manufacturing sectors, and document that there are subtle differences across sectors in leads and lags for switches between business cycle recessions and expansions. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.