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Reverse engineering and innovation : empirical evidence from a high-tech economy
Get PDFReverse engineering allows firms to learn about critical components and design features of competitors' technologies. Historically, reverse engineering has often been used to help technological laggards to catch-up and profit from other's inventions. However, through reverse engineering firms may also obtain knowledge that can be used for own innovation efforts beyond mere imitation, making it a relevant knowledge acquisition channel for technological leading firms in high-tech economies. Based on data from the German part of the Community Innovation Survey (CIS), this paper provides empirical evidence on the characteristics of firms that use reverse engineering, and whether reverse engineering can lead to superior innovation performance in terms of commercializing innovations with a high degree of novelty. Our results suggest that in the context of a high-tech economy, it is rather firms that operate under fierce price competition that use reverse engineering, helping them to obtain higher innovation output, though for innovations with a low degree of novelty
Determinants of political elites’ engagement with climate change
Get PDFClimate change poses an escalating global threat, requiring urgent political action. While we know that political elites play a crucial role in addressing climate issues, we don’t fully understand what drives their engagement. This thesis seeks to identify the determinants—both endogenous and exogenous—of political elites’ engagement with climate change. Using party manifestos, parliamentary speech records, and candidate survey data from European democracies, it applies quantitative text analysis and regression modeling. The findings show that, contrary to expectations, climate disasters reduce parties’ attention to climate issues. In contrast, younger MPs and candidates are more likely to engage with climate change, particularly in urban constituencies. These results suggest that demographic and contextual factors significantly influence climate engagement, while external shocks may trigger strategic avoidance. This implies that effective climate policy depends not only on the transformation of economic and ecological variables, but of political institutions and their compositions as well
Nikolas Immer, Mnemopoetik. Formen und Figurationen von Erinnerung in der deutschsprachigen Lyrik der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. 2023
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Die Helikopter-Eltern der Forschung : Wie Datenschutzgesetze und Bürokratie den Zugang zu Forschung und Behandlung für Kinder, Jugendliche und ihre Bezugspersonen erschweren
Get PDFRe-evaluating the role of refugee integration factors for building more equitable allocation algorithms
No full textNumerous studies in the social sciences have examined how individual and location-level characteristics influence refugees’ integration outcomes. A more recent, smaller body of computational research has developed algorithmic tools that aim to improve refugee integration by optimizing matching to resettlement locations based on predicted outcomes. These tools, which are piloted in a number of countries, raise a number of concerns. This includes, first, their reliance on a narrow set of individual-level predictors – most of which are protected attributes under global anti-discrimination laws – overlooking valuable insights from migration studies that may improve predictive accuracy. Second, they guide refugee placement decisions without assessing group fairness, potentially reinforcing existing inequalities. Against this background, we draw on comprehensive refugee panel data from Germany and study the economic integration of refugees through the lens of predictive modeling. Specifically, we develop prediction models that integrate and test a wide range of integration factors from migration research. We then compare our extended model configurations with existing refugee-location matching algorithms, and evaluate group model performance to assess generalizability and fairness. Overall, we highlight the importance of integrating insights from migration studies into the development of algorithmic decision-making tools to improve their reliability and promote fair outcomes across diverse groups
The effect of attentional abilities on vocabulary and grammar acquisition in young ESL learners
No full textBudgeting biases and profit expectations
No full textWe investigate how subordinates' strategic incentives to bias budgets are associated with senior managers’ profit expectations. Using proprietary panel data of internal profit forecasts from 2013–2019, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase in the importance of budget-based performance evaluation is associated with a 14–27% downward bias in profit forecasts. In contrast, the importance of budgets for resource allocation is partly associated with an upward bias. Cross-sectional tests reveal that the downward bias is stronger when budgets contain a higher proportion of newly planned information, are more highly aggregated, and when firms rely more strongly on bottom-up information flows. Field interviews with CFOs suggest that these biases persist because senior managers partially tolerate forecast inaccuracies in light of information asymmetries, learning frictions, and relationship maintenance costs. Together, our findings bridge research in accounting and economics by providing novel evidence on the connection between organizational design and forecast accuracy