Machine learning for financial transaction classification across companies using character-level word embeddings of text fields

An important initial step in accounting is mapping financial transfers to the corresponding accounts. We devised machine-learning-based systems that automate this process. They use word embeddings with character-level features to process transaction texts. When considering 473 companies independently, our approach achieved an average top-1 accuracy of 80.50%, outperforming baselines that exclude the transaction texts or rely on a lexical bag-of-words text representation. We extended the approach to generalizes across companies and even across different corporate sectors. After standardization of the account structures and careful feature engineering, a single classifier trained on 44 companies from 28 sectors achieved a test accuracy of more than 80%. When trained on 43 companies and tested on the remaining one, the system achieved an average performance of 64.62%. This rate increased to nearly 70% when considering only the largest sector.     

Firm age and performance

Amid increasing interest in firm age and its effects on firm performance, this special issue offers an exhaustive review of the literature and a novel collection of evidence on the effects of firm age on performance, including a special focus of interest on innovation performance, financial performance, exports, survival and growth. This editorial positions the theme in the extant literature, and provides key definitions and challenges ahead in the field of evolutionary economics. It introduces the collection of articles composing the special issue. The papers offer a diversity of country contexts, as well as analytical approaches and methods. They include an exhaustive review of the literature on age and firms’ performance, and present original empirical studies focusing on the effects of age on firms’ economic outcomes on the one hand, and on innovation outcomes on the other hand. While most of the papers use econometric analysis, the level of analysis ranges from firm to individual.     

Planning comprehensiveness and strategy in SME's

Although it is generally assumed that planning is of great value for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME's), little is known about the conditions that influence the organization of the planning process. In this paper it is hypothesized that planning comprehensiveness is, to a certain extent, related to the complexity and variability of the strategies pursued by SME's. This hypothesis is partially supported by an empirical study in which 154 SME's in the Dutch Machinery Industry are involved.     

Schumpeter 1911: Farsighted Visions on Economic Development

This paper presents to the English-speaking reader a sample of material contained only in Schumpeter's first German edition (1911) of Theorie der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung , material subsequently omitted from later German editions and from the English translation. The newly-translated material, presented here for the first time in English, comprises a substantial part of the second chapter, only available in a completely rewritten version, and fully half of the famous seventh chapter, which has not been previously available at all in English. This material merits attention today because it contains remarkable and farsighted visions on economic theory that may inspire current efforts to devise models of economic and social evolution. In order to better appreciate the original text, we briefly introduce the "background" to Theorie and its revisions, briefly describing the social and intellectual environment of the time. We then discuss how the entrepreneur evolved over the three editions of Theorie (from 1911 to 1934) in view of the shift in Schumpeter's personal and intellectual life and outline the most important implications raised by the first German edition of 1911. Finally, we use Schumpeter's own statements to settle the obstinate confusion on the publication year of Theorie in favour of the year 1911.     

Killing off cohorts: Forecasting mortality of non-extinct cohorts with the penalized composite link model

Mortality forecasting has crucial implications for insurance and pension policies. A large amount of literature has proposed models to forecast mortality using cross-sectional (period) data instead of longitudinal (cohort) data. As a consequence, decisions are generally based on period life tables and summary measures such as period life expectancy, which reflect hypothetical mortality rather than the mortality actually experienced by a cohort. This study introduces a novel method to forecast cohort mortality and the cohort life expectancy of non-extinct cohorts. The intent is to complete the mortality profile of cohorts born up to 1960. The proposed method is based on the penalized composite link model for ungrouping data. The performance of the method is investigated using cohort mortality data retrieved from the Human Mortality Database for England & Wales, Sweden, and Switzerland for male and female populations.     

Environmental quality indicators: Background,principles and examples from Norway

The need for a simple and general overview of the development in the state of the environment has led to work on environmental indicators in several countries and international organizations. Except for the basic common requirement of providing an overview, the works vary a great deal with regard to final aim, target groups, classification and, hence, choice of indicators. This paper gives an overview of the work carried out in the Central Bureau of Statistics of Norway within this field, with emphasis on the basic principles behind the choice of indicators. A hierarchical system of indicator sets is proposed, and examples of indicators are presented. Also, a brief overview of work carried out elsewhere is included.