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| Successful commercialisation of academic research is of great importance to the development of a strong economy and subsequent re-investment in skills and infrastructure. The biological and medical sciences area has been shown to contribute a significant proportion of global research and development expenditure resulting in a high level of activity and competition amongst researchers to commercialise their work. This article reviews best practice in commercialisation and presents a model which will inform those seeking to improve the prospects for commercial success.
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| The prevalence of police deviance is a much-debated statistic and one that is often rife with problems. Based on 56 convicted police officers in Norway, court cases are analyzed in this paper to identify relationships between imprisonment days for convicted police officers and motive and brutality as determinants of each sentence. While there is a positive correlation found between severity of sentence and the extent of personal motive, there is a negative correlation between severity of sentence and the extent of brutality applied in policing.
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| In this, the fourth article in the economists’ hubris paper series we look at the contributions of academic thought to the field of asset management. We find that while the theoretical aspects of the modern portfolio theory are valuable they offer little insight into how the asset management industry actually operates, how its executives are compensated, and how their performances are measured. We find that very few, if any, portfolio managers look for the efficiency frontier in their asset allocation processes, mainly because it is almost impossible to locate in reality, and base their decisions on a combination of gut feelings and analyst recommendations. We also find that the performance evaluation methodologies used are simply unable to provide investors with the necessary tools to compare portfolio managers’ performances in any meaningful way. We suggest a novel way of evaluating manager performance which compares a manager against himself, as suggested by Lord Myners. Using the concept of inertia, an asset manager’s end of period performance is compared to the performance of his/her portfolio assuming his/her initial portfolio had been held, without transactions, during this period. We believe that this will provide clients with a more reliable performance comparison tool and might prevent unnecessary trading of portfolios. Finally, given that the performance evaluation models simply fail in practice, we suggest that accusing investors who look for raw returns when deciding who to invest their assets with is simply unfair.
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| The failure of academic finance can be considered one of the symbols of the financial crisis. Two important underlying reasons why academic finance models systematically fail to account for real-world phenomena follow directly from two conventions: (a) treating economics not as a ‘true’ social science, but as a branch of applied mathematics inspired by the methodology of classical physics, and (b) using economic models as if the empirical content of economic theories is not very low. Failure to understand and appreciate the inherent weaknesses of these ‘conventions’ had fatal consequences for the use and interpretation of key academic finance concepts and models by market practitioners and policymakers. Theoretical constructs such as the efficient markets hypothesis, rational expectations, and market completeness were too often treated as intellectual dogmas instead of (parts of) falsifiable hypotheses. The situation of capture via dominant intellectual dogmas of policymakers, investors, and business managers was made worse by sins of omission - the failure of academics to communicate the limitations of their models and to warn against (potential) misuses of their research - and sins of commission – introducing (often implicitly) ideological or biased features in research programs. Hence, the deeper problem with finance concepts such as the ‘efficient markets hypothesis’ and ‘ratex theory’ is notthat they are based on assumptions that are considered as not being ‘realistic’. The real issue at stake with academic finance is not a quarrel about the validity of the assumption of rational behavior but the inherent semantical insufficiency of economic theories that implies a low empirical content, and a high degree of specification uncertainty. This perspective makes the scientific approach advocated by Friedman and others less straightforward. In addition, there is wide-spread failure to incorporate the key implications of economics as a social science. As a response to these ‘weaknesses’ and challenges, five suggested principles or guidelines for future research programs are outlined.
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| A manager’s job consists of several parallel roles. At a certain point in time, one role may be more critical than other roles. For police managers, the roles of personnel leader and resource allocator belong to the police unit. The roles of spokesman and entrepreneur belong to the relationship between police unit and police organization, while the roles of monitor and liaison belong to the relationship between police unit and police environment.
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21 May 2013 |
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