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There is growing awareness within the economics profession of the important role narratives play in the economy. Even though empirical approaches that try to quantify economic narratives are getting increasingly popular, there is no theory or even a universally accepted definition of economic narratives underlying this research. First, we review and categorize the economic literature concerned with narratives and work out the different paradigms at play. Only a subset of the literature considers narratives to be active drivers of economic activity. To solidify the foundation of narrative economics, we propose a definition of collective economic narratives, isolating five important characteristics. We argue that, for a narrative to be economically relevant, it must be a sense‐making story that emerges in a social context and suggests action to a social group. We also systematize how a collective economic narrative differs from a topic and from other kinds of narratives that are likely to have less impact on the economy. With regard to the popular use of topic modeling, we suggest that the complementary use of other methods from the natural language processing (NLP) toolkit and the development of new methods is inevitable to go beyond identifying topics and move towards true empirical narrative economics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: to identify narratives describing the use of public procurement system for innovation policy implementation and to critically analyze them.Methods: quantitative analysis of the frequency of narratives, qualitative analysis of narratives to identify protomodels, institutions and social context.Results: in the modern Russian economic system, public procurement is used as a tool for implementing the national innovation policy. The analysis of legal acts regulating public procurement of innovative and high-tech goods showed the trends that potentially reduce the variability of procuring entities' actions and the transparency of procurement procedures. Based on the tools of narrative economics, the authors analyzed the attitude of actors (representatives of the state, business and academia) of the Russian innovation system to the existing practice of public procurement in the context of the national innovation policy. As a result, the work presents a typology of public procurement problems, discussed in mass media, for Russia’s innovative development.Scientific novelty: the considered narratives show that, in relation to the Russian innovation system, the public procurement subjects can act in the logic of the “principal-agent” theory, while the tendency to reduce transparency is welcomed by some actors.Practical significance: institutional analysis of the recent changes in public procurement, including the rules governing the procurement of innovative and high-tech products, has revealed the devolution of formalized rules aimed at the implementation of state innovation policy. Together with the increased level of privacy in organizational activities of procuring entities, this carries the risks of not only increasing the level of opportunistic behavior of the public procurement market subjects, but also decreasing confidence in the entire public procurement system.

Comparing recommendations coming from the theoretical research on economic modeling of the national innovation system with suggestions based on the narrative analysis of actors from the Russian innovation system (RIS) may help design a strategy for the regulation of innovative development. The study aims to produce recommendations for the state innovation policy by examining actors’ perceptions. Narrative economics combined with elements of original institutionalism constitutes the methodological basis of the research. The paper uses qualitative methods of narrative analysis. The evidence base is narratives of the RIS actors contained in rating and specialised Russian media and Internet resources, as well as in 27 in-depth interviews, selected during the online expert sampling. According to the study’s findings, the RIS actors note a significant role of the state in the development of innovation in the narratives, but at the same time point to such problems as inconsistency of government actions, instability of innovation policy, lack of effective mechanisms for increasing financing of innovation projects. Respondents attach particular importance to business involvement in innovation, creation and promotion of entrepreneurial initiative, expansion of economic freedom. The results of the study allow identifying the most critical factors in and methods for boosting activity in the national innovation system.

This research addresses the strategic issue of why key decision-makers fail to foresee potential extreme 'black swan' events. Following a review of the literature, a conceptual framework is developed that identifies two types of organisational blindness that are reflected in Tetlock's hedgehog cognitive thinking style, being the oversimplification of uncertainty (e.g., inductive biases) and an unquestioned, top-down, reference narrative. This framework is tested using a case study approach and qualitative analysis of secondary data sources available from the Royal Commission of Inquiry and other published reports following the 2010 methane explosion at the Pike River Coal Ltd.'s mine (Pike) in New Zealand, that killed 29 miners and caused the loss of all funds invested. The results indicate that the combined effect of both blindnesses meant that Pike's collective intelligence was limited, and for the three key decision-makers at the Pike River mine, some type of extreme 'black swan' event was apparently inevitable. This research provides theoretical and practical contributions to the analysis of business and public policy decision-making under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACTThis paper proposes a new interpretation of place brand as a multilevel threshold public good (MTPG) produced by the interaction of narratives from different geographical levels. Using an original dataset of Google trends and tweets from Italian provinces and regions, we test the hypothesis that place branding has a multilevel structure. We further test the MTPG framework applied to place branding, showing that place branding is influenced by different geographical levels which can trigger a spillover in terms of attractiveness if they contribute to crossing a threshold point. The results confirm the presence of a provision point in place branding, showing that the proposed MTPG framework fits the phenomenon. This article contributes to the literature on place branding and brands by providing a new lens through which to interpret the phenomenon, which may be useful for a better understanding and measuring of the interaction of branding strategies operating at different spatial scales.

This paper proposes a new interpretation of place brand as a multilevel threshold public good (MTPG) produced by the interaction of narratives from different geographical levels. Using an original dataset of Google trends and tweets from Italian provinces and regions, we test the hypothesis that place branding has a multilevel structure. We further test the MTPG framework applied to place branding, showing that place branding is influenced by different geographical levels which can trigger a spillover in terms of attractiveness if they contribute to crossing a threshold point. The results confirm the presence of a provision point in place branding, showing that the proposed MTPG framework fits the phenomenon. This article contributes to the literature on place branding and brands by providing a new lens through which to interpret the phenomenon, which may be useful for a better understanding and measuring of the interaction of branding strategies operating at different spatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by Austin's conceptualisation of utterances as performative, that is, they do things rather than merely represent, research has shown how scientific theories can become performative in financial markets. Research also shows that brokerage and investment work is as much about using everyday knowledge of markets as it is about performing scientific theories. We investigate whether and how this knowledge or what Swedberg calls 'folk economics' can also be performative. We focus on Borsa Istanbul, an emerging market where market actors perform what we call 'the American Spirit' – a ubiquitous folk theory that frames and plots the Turkish market as one that moves in tandem with American and other developed markets – and in the process become better market forecasters. Our findings have implications for the study of folk economics and performativity in global economy and finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contemporary Accounting Research is the property of Canadian Academic Accounting Association and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

ABSTRACT By contrasting the Great Depression and the Coronacrisis, we demonstrate that narrative economics (Shiller, 2017) is key in the analysis of economic fluctuations. We note the importance of the populist narrative to understand the economic and health outcomes of the Coronacrisis in Mexico and highlight the role of the predominance of different economic paradigms in economic policy decision-making. We suggest that, just as in 1929, by following orthodox primary fiscal balance sheet policies at the cost of contracting government investment, the Mexican economy will undergo a long and painful recovery process compared to its global peers.

The Russian innovation system is lagging behind the developed countries in terms of many parameters. In the paper, we identify the specificities and patterns of this system evolution by analysing the narratives of its actors. Methodologically, we take advantage of the synthesis of narrative economics and original institutionalism. The methods include narrative analysis, in-depth interview, and econometric analysis of how sub-indices referencing the innovation inputs and outputs influence the economic growth. The data comes in two types: qualitative ones from 27 in-depth interviews conducted from April to August 2022 and quantitative ones from the Global Innovation Index 2021. Based on a linear regression model with an innovation input and output interaction component we find that despite their proven positive impact on the economic growth, the return on innovation outputs decreases with an increase in inputs which indicates the presence of positive externalities. The research findings demonstrate that the factors “institutions”, “human capital and research”, “infrastructure”, “market and business sophistication” combined into the innovation input sub-index of the Global Innovation Index, are associated with the functioning of increasing return mechanisms in the economy. We identified the following main malfunctions of the Russian innovation system based on a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews: lack of consistency, poor quality of institutions and legislation imperfection, science underfunding along with excessive control, selectivity of the state innovation policy. The results confirm the necessity of studying narratives for gaining a more complete understanding of how and what stable constructions are used by actors to explain the problems related to the formal and informal institutions of the Russian innovation system.

This research addresses the strategic issue of why key decision-makers fail to foresee potential extreme ‘black swan’ events. Following a review of the literature, a conceptual framework is developed that identifies two types of organisational blindness that are reflected in Tetlock’s hedgehog cognitive thinking style, being the oversimplification of uncertainty (e.g., inductive biases) and an unquestioned, top-down, reference narrative. This framework is tested using a case study approach and qualitative analysis of secondary data sources available from the Royal Commission of Inquiry and other published reports following the 2010 methane explosion at the Pike River Coal Ltd.’s mine (Pike) in New Zealand, that killed 29 miners and caused the loss of all funds invested. The results indicate that the combined effect of both blindnesses meant that Pike’s collective intelligence was limited, and for the three key decision-makers at the Pike River mine, some type of extreme ‘black swan’ event was apparently inevitable. This research provides theoretical and practical contributions to the analysis of business and public policy decision-making under uncertainty.

This article explores the peculiar approach to narrative argumentation taken by the MIT economist Evsey Domar (1914–97). Combining biography and textual analysis of his academic work reveals that Cold War themes permeated Domar's later research in comparative economic systems, Soviet economics, and economic history—and yet, Domar employed these themes in ways that challenge traditional understandings of postwar American social science. Against the heady partisanship and epistemic self-confidence that characterized his milieu, Domar offered conclusions that emphasized ambiguity, complexity, and open-endedness. He achieved this, the article argues, by thinking not only comparatively but also historically and speculatively. This article takes a journey through a number of Domar's historical and speculative narratives to demonstrate that what Domar was ultimately doing in many of his works was resisting normative, literary, and scientific closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This paper elicits and quantifies narratives from open‐ended surveys sent daily to US stockholders during the first wave of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Using textual analysis, we extract 13 narratives and measure their prevalence over time. A validation analysis confirms the behavioral and economic relevance of the retrieved narratives. Moreover, we find that the narratives contain predictive information for future excess stock and bond returns, and this predictability remains when controlling for contemporaneous information stemming from news and social media. Finally, we find evidence that political identity is reflected in the narrative tone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By contrasting the Great Depression and the Coronacrisis, we demonstrate that narrative economics (Shiller, 2017) is key in the analysis of economic fluctuations. We note the importance of the populist narrative to understand the economic and health outcomes of the Coronacrisis in Mexico and highlight the role of the predominance of different economic paradigms in economic policy decision-making. We suggest that, just as in 1929, by following orthodox primary fiscal balance sheet policies at the cost of contracting government investment, the Mexican economy will undergo a long and painful recovery process compared to its global peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Revolutionary technological change in the publishing business and the expansion of information technology have given an impetus for scientific journals institution to evolve with the development of bibliographic databases that create new information products, indicators, and indices. The Russian scientific journals institution, which plays a significant role in the Russian innovation system, is developing in line with this trend. The article analyses the Russian innovation system actors’ narratives regarding the role of journals in the functioning of the system. The methodological basis of the study includes theories and approaches of narrative economics and original institutionalism that allow focusing on the use of qualitative research methods. Narratives reflect actors’ ideas of publication activity indicators getting increasingly used in management practices in the field of education and science. These indicators have received special significance within the framework of the managerialism doctrine, or new public management, in which publication activity indicators were associated with the effectiveness of scientific research. The role of journals and indices is considered from two points of view: at the individual level actors talk about personal success in publishing articles in top-rated journals; however, at the level of science and education the role of publication activity indicators is described using negative connotations; actors refer to the situations as problematic. Further development of the Russian scientific journals institution should contribute to the formation of new foundations and organizational structures which allow taking into account and intensifying the grassroots initiatives of scientists and innovators.

The article assesses the importance of cultural discourse in economics by exploring the extroversive cultural link between language use frequency and bilateral trade flows. Using linguistic data from Google n-grams and data on bilateral trade flows with China over the 1821–2008 period, we test whether the frequency of use of the word "tea" in a Chinese trading partner's language is associated with the nominal value of its trade flows with China. Our findings suggest that the frequency of use of the word tea predicts current and future trade flows with China, and trade flows affect the frequency of use of the word tea albeit to a lesser extent. The frequency of use of the word tea is influenced by the overall size of the Chinese economy irrespective of the size of the economy of China's trading partner, but smaller countries use the word tea more and increase its use faster. We conclude that the creation of a cultural discourse is endogenous to economic power, and cultural discourse amplifies trade flows. These findings validate the importance of narrative economics and the Culture-Based Development perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General public's mental health can be affected by the public policy response to a pandemic threat. Britain, Italy and Sweden have had very distinct approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic: early lock-down, delayed lock-down and no-lock-down. We develop a novel narrative economics of language Culture-Based Development approach, and using Google trend data for seed keywords, death and suicide, we reach two main conclusions: (i) while countries had a pre-existing culturally relative disposition towards death-related anxiety, the sensitivity to the public policy towards COVID-19 was also country specific; (ii) however, significant spillovers from one specific national lockdown public policy to another country's mental health are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many efforts have been made to investigate the sentiment in financial and commercial real estate markets, but only a few studies focus on residential markets because of the lack of appropriate sentiment measuring approaches. In this study, we utilize social media narratives to build sentiment indexes for the housing market in China, where house-price-related narratives are abundantly documented on social media. With the help of the latest text analysis technologies from the deep learning and natural language processing fields, our indexes are built on a solid basis for understanding the semantic meanings of textual data. Highlighting the semantic temporality of text, we build separate future and past sentiment indexes to capture people's prior beliefs and posterior feelings about price movements, respectively. The future sentiment index could serve as an alternative to survey-based expectations, measure the impacts of policies on people's beliefs, and have remarkable power in predicting the future movements of both listed developers' stock prices and house prices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Orientation: Market events during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic exposed flaws in the econometric models used to derive International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) 9 impairments. Models were unable to capture the level of government intervention or predict the economic recovery process because of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic. Research purpose: This study examines the causes of the challenges experienced with the IFRS 9 models during the pandemic and approaches to minimise this risk in the future. Motivation for the study: Structural correlation breaks forced banks to replace the IFRS 9 models with expert overlays or rapidly rebuild the models to reduce impairment volatility and manage the impact on earnings. Expert judgement may lead to biased outcomes. Research approach/design and method: Behavioural finance theory suggests that emotion and cognitive biases often lead to irrational investment decisions with disastrous consequences to the market. The link between market sentiment and economic outcomes is tested with natural language processing. Archimedean copulas are used to compare the dependence structures of market variables between different stress periods. Main findings: Market sentiment is closely related to the trends observed in major macroeconomic indicators. The nature of the dependence structures differs between stress periods. Practical/managerial implications: Sentiment may be a valuable exogenous variable to incorporate into economic forecast models. Learnings from one stress period are not necessarily applicable to another. Contribution/value-add: Government intervention and market sentiment had a significant impact on the economic outcomes and correlation breaks observed during the pandemic. Developing bespoke models for the different phases of the economic cycle may not necessarily lead to improved outcomes.

The analysis of innovation systems is a demanding task, which needs to be tackled comprehensively. Their modelling provides an indication of the formal innovative performance while the narrative analysis helps to examine relevant judgments about the rules and institutions that are key to the development of innovations. The study of the complementarity and non-complementarity of the conclusions obtained using both approaches is likely to contribute to a deeper understanding of the Russian innovation system functioning. The paper aims to analyse how the content and spread of the national innovation system narratives are interrelated with the modelling of the Russian innovation system and the most important indicators of its functioning. Methodologically, the research takes advantage of the methodological synthesis of narrative economics and original institutionalism. The research methods include narrative analysis, cointegration analysis of mutual influence between narratives and innovation indicators. The authors identify peculiar features of innovation systems’ modelling, analyse the texts, stories and other sources containing narratives about the Russian innovation system development, and based on this discover the relationship between the spread of certain narratives (the frequencies of word groups “innovative technologies”, “technology development”, “innovation activities”, “technology implementation”, “scientific schools”, “innovation policy”, “science and technology”) and innovation indicators (share of innovative goods, works, services in the total volume of goods shipped, works performed, services provided; share of expenditure on innovation activities in the total volume of goods shipped, works performed, services provided). The analysis also shows cointegration between the frequency of search queries “use of patents” and innovation indicators “number of patent application” and “number of patents issued”. The authors point to a number of limitations related to the innovation system modelling. There are some typical limitations such as availability and reliability of statistical data, methodological heterogeneity of statistics, model specification, etc., as well as some specific ones including a broad, ambiguous definition of the national innovation system, differences in the approaches to defining principal determinants, innovations immeasurability, considerations of the system connections and economies of scale, etc. Thus, the findings confirm the need for a narrative study in order to achieve an in-depth understanding of complex economic processes.

Effective public administration of the innovation system is a complex task that can be resolved through qualitative analysis of institutional arrangement, institutional environment and infrastructure. The article aims to identify relevant judgments about the rules, routines and institutions that are of key importance for the innovative development. The authors rely on the narrative analysis when dealing with the discourses of the innovation system’s actors (entrepreneurs, scholars, and public authorities). Methodologically, the study rests on original institutional economics and narrative economics. The targeted sample includes the narratives of actors from 43 ranking sources of mass media, magazines, and online resources provided by the Integrum electronic database. The ranking sources were selected using the Medialogia analytical system. The research timeframe covers the period from January 1, 2010 to July 1, 2021. We identified five “failures” of public administration, which had a negative impact on the functioning of the Russian innovation system: 1) path dependence in determining the priority areas of research and technological development; 2) the rise of “artificial competition” for administrative monopolies (financial and managerial resources); 3) overregulation of the market for innovations and excessive bureaucracy; 4) inconsistent and dispersed management model; 5) low speed of implementation of innovative projects. The research findings prove the necessity for alternative directions for the development of research and technologies in the context of the global innovation market.

This article explores the role of narratives as drivers that guide the institutional change associated with globalization and deglobalization. For China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to succeed as a driver of institutional change in favor of globalization, it must pass the narrative "virality" test and successfully contend with competing narratives. Rival narratives will be launched by firms and organizations worldwide that expect to win or lose from deglobalization or from new forms of globalization. This study develops a useful framework for establishing the extent to which China's BRI is a genuine narrative or just a story. In this regard, four testable propositions are put forth to ascertain whether the BRI is values-based, extends an invitation to participate, is open-ended, and is associated with economic performance for both Chinese and non-Chinese participants. The analysis of the BRI-related institutional change that leads to globalization applies a theoretical lens centered on the narrative economics perspective and on the institution-based view and political economy perspective. Implications for BRI stakeholders, international business practitioners, and international business scholarship are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using eight cross-section econometric models applied to a sample of 31 countries, we find that, although the Case Fatality Ratio (CFR) of COVID-19 is explained by 'structural' variables that were given prior to the pandemic (healthcare infrastructure, comorbidities, poverty and the HDI), the 'response' variables to the crisis (fiscal support, health policy, and, above all, government narrative) have been determinant in the evolution of the pandemic. We show that the dummy variable representing populist countries is significant, demonstrating that, as Shiller (2017) stated, narrative plays a major role in shaping behavior and economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we use narrative economics to analyze the social conditions promoting the growth in private investment in esports—specifically in North American esports teams and franchises. Investment in the esport industry has outpaced revenue growth and esport teams do not have a proven cash flow model. To understand this disjuncture, we draw upon the narrative economic approaches developed by Robert Shiller and colleagues who have demonstrated how the public narrative holds the potential to influence economic behavior—and whereby following a popular story might lead to irrational investment, labor, or consumption practices. We provide a quantitative analysis of published stories that shows the virality of esport narratives is consistent with epidemic models and that business investment narratives are spreading faster than general esport narratives. We then provide a mixed method analysis that demonstrates the central narrative of esport stories is one of growth, opportunity, and sport-esport synergies. We conclude with a discussion about the industrial and theoretical implications of studying viral stories as they relate to preconditioning economic behavior in the sports industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT The objective of this review is to discuss the formation of knowledge proposed by Keynes on his Treatise on Probability, and the economic agents’ behavior in an uncertainty scenario presented on his General Theory, by the Narrative Economics’ and Behavioral Economics perspectives. The hypothesis that will be analyzed is that in a keynesian uncertainty scenario, economic agents tend to act according to their context (social, geographic, historic, cultural) spreading narratives by which they identify themselves and orient decisions that cause sensible movements on the economic aggregates. Revisiting the literature, we could conclude that by bringing together the behavioral economy and the narrative economy theory, we could, from the Keynes’ insights on his writings, perceive strong empirical evidence that can be analytically important on the assessment of the economic fluctuations.

Motivation: At the initial stage of accounting evolution it was considered an economic science, closely related to the activities performed by economic entities in economic conditions. Therefore, narratives in economics should be considered a determinant for the development of narratives in accounting. The indication of narrative economics as a reference point for narration in accounting supplements the research gap, since nowadays narratives in accounting are most often interpreted as the narratives prepared by companies and addressed to the potential stakeholders in the context of achieving specific goals by the management board and company executives. Aim: The purpose of the article is to address the phenomenon of narrative accounting in the light of narrative economics and the evolution of reporting targeting non-financial information. Results: Economic narratives facilitate the understanding of numbers, extend and supplement financial information and allow for the interpretation of economic processes. The narratives coming from economics are processed and disclosed in accounting. They are an indispensable attribute of modern accounting as well as its narration. Reporting is an important instrument allowing narration in accounting (primarily non-financial reporting). The research confirms: positive messages included in the analysed Letters from Management Board Presidents; references in the text to economic factors and the characteristic financial and social activities in specific companies; indication of the key words in the text, among which the dominant ones are those with a positive overtone and also the ones relating to non-material resources; creating narrative reporting in order to develop and strengthen relationships with potential stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative of homeownership for all citizens is a uniquely American story. Narrative economics is a field that studies the spread of stories to explain economic fluctuations. We quantitatively examine the relationship between the American housing narrative and the run-up in home prices experienced since the Great Recession in the United States. We rely on a natural language processing (NLP) framework to measure the sentiment associated with the narrative. We then use a panel vector autoregression to empirically model the relationship between home prices and homeownership sentiment in the United States. We find that sentiment related to the American homeownership narrative is an important factor in explaining movements in home prices even after taking into account the economic factors typically thought to explain home price fluctuations. Though others have examined the role of sentiment in markets, our study is the first to empirically measure the American homeownership narrative. While this is a narrative promoted at the national level, future research might examine whether sentiment related to homeownership varies across this diverse nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this review is to discuss the formation of knowledge proposed by Keynes on his Treatise on Probability, and the economic agents' behavior in an uncertainty scenario presented on his General Theory, by the Narrative Economics' and Behavioral Economics perspectives. The hypothesis that will be analyzed is that in a keynesian uncertainty scenario, economic agents tend to act according to their context (social, geographic, historic, cultural) spreading narratives by which they identify themselves and orient decisions that cause sensible movements on the economic aggregates. Revisiting the literature, we could conclude that by bringing together the behavioral economy and the narrative economy theory, we could, from the Keynes' insights on his writings, perceive strong empirical evidence that can be analytically important on the assessment of the economic fluctuations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies the phenomenon of institutional traps resulting from modern reforms in public sector and higher education in Russia in the context of New Public Management. The research methodology embraces theoretical patterns and approaches of institutional economics. The research methods include interpretative, narrative and content analysis of opinions and expressions of actors retrieved from various mass media. The ideology of New Public Management is viewed as a result of neoliberal discourse which has become increasingly popular in the past few decades all over the world. Neoliberal reforms were first initiated in the United Kingdom and a number of other developed countries in the 1980s – 1990s in many sectors, including the public one. These institutional traps are sustainable forms of the lock-in effect in the context of path dependence theory. The authors focus on primarily two types of them – the metrics trap and the bureaucracy (administrative) trap – and analyse them theoretically and empirically. Within the framework of theoretical analysis, the traps’ relevance is due to social laws such as Campbell’s law and Graeber’s “iron law of liberalism”. These laws illustrate some negative fallout in social and economic activities focused on specific indicators in the public sector. Empirically, we explore these institutional traps using narrative analysis of mass-media reports, interviews and online discussions and citations. It characterizes the way in which the reforms implemented in higher education are perceived. The authors conclude that there is the interrelation between the problems in reforming higher education and the ideology of New Public Management, which causes the need for rethinking the strategy and ideology of modern reforms in higher education.

The digital and information age has fundamentally transformed the way in which students learn and the study material they have at their disposal, especially in higher education. Students need to possess a number of higher-order cognitive and metacognitive skills, including effective information processing and critical reasoning to be able to navigate the Internet and use online sources, even those found outside of academically curated domains and in the depths of the Internet, and to solve (domain-specific) problems. Linking qualitative and quantitative research and connecting the humanities to empirical educational science studies, this article investigates the role of narratives and their impact on university students’ information seeking and their critical online reasoning (COR). This study focuses on the link between students’ online navigation skills, information seeking behavior and critical reasoning with regard to the specific domains: economics and medicine. For the empirical analysis in this article, we draw on a study that assesses the COR skills of undergraduate students of economics and medicine at two German universities. To measure COR skills, we used five tasks from the computer-based assessment “Critical Online Reasoning Assessment” (CORA), which assesses students’ skills in critically evaluating online sources and reasoning using evidence on contentious issues. The conceptual framework of this study is based on an existing methodology – narrative economics and medicine – and discusses its instructional potential and how it can be used to develop a new tool of “wise interventions” to enhance students’ COR in higher education. Based on qualitative content analyses of the students’ written responses, i.e., short essays, three distinct patterns of information seeking behavior among students have been identified. These three patterns – “Unambiguous Fact-Checking,” “Perspective-Taking Without Fact-Checking,” and “Web Credibility-Evaluating” – differ substantially in their potential connection to underlying narratives of information used by students to solve the CORA tasks. This analysis suggests that training university students in narrative analysis can strongly contribute to enhancing their critical online reasoning.

In the modern conditions of the post-COVID world, the transformation of the world economy in the framework of the transition to the post-industrial paradigm, and the economy of “knowledge”, the national innovation system (NIS) plays a leading role in the formation of competitive sectors of any given country. Within this setting, the performance of the Russian innovation system significantly lags behind other countries and calls for modernisation based on the modern regulatory tools, policies, and world’s leading trends. The direct import of institutions of foreign innovation systems demonstrates its limited effectiveness due to the incompleteness of institutions and mechanisms for regulating the institutional environment of the Russian economy. One of the generally recognised, leading, and the most “universal” instruments for implementing innovation policy by government institutions is the public procurement of innovation. The analysis of international experience shows that the implementation of the innovation policy via innovative public procurement has a highly heterogeneous landscape even in such a “cohesive” jurisdiction as those represented by the European Union (EU) as far as different types of policy dominate in different countries of the world. There is no clear trend towards the only one mainstream regulatory approach. In this context, the Russian experience demonstrates de facto the absence of any centralised, transparent, and effective policy expressed in such pseudo-innovative procurement as refuelling cartridges or car repairs. This paper identifies the existing institutional failures of the Russian NIS on the example of the regulation of innovative domestic procurement. It proposes ways to modernise the current policy based on the institutional and narrative approaches in order to foster its leading position in the international competition. This article shows the gaps in the literature in institutional governance of innovations and innovation procurement in Russia and points at directions for future research based on narrative economics. Outlining the present knowledge as a foundation for future research in institutional governance of innovations, this article holds implications for both academics and practitioners in the field of the innovation policies and public procurement.

This article addresses a range of questions associated with the occurrence of a new field of study – narrative economics, which is considered in the context of modern institutionalism. Pioneering works of R. Shiller, G. Akerlof and D. Snower spotlighted the importance of analyzing narratives and narrative influence when studying economic processes. In this paper, a qualitative study of narratives is seen through the prism of an answer to the question: «How do prescribed narratives influence institutions and change them? ». Narratives have much in common with institutions since very often, explicitly or implicitly, they contain value judgements about social interactions or normative aspects shaping behavioral patterns. The identification of dominating narratives enables us to understand better how institutions influence economic (social) action. Repeated interactions among social actors are structured through understanding and learning the rules. Understanding of social rules comes from the language – we articulate and perceive the rules drawing on common narratives. Narratives and institutions are helpful when actors gain knowledge about various forms of social communication. Digital technologies, mass media and social networking sites facilitate the spread of narratives, values and beliefs; this process is characterized by increasing returns. Studying narratives and institutions is crucial for modern economic theory because it helps to improve qualitative and quantitative methods of analyzing empirical evidence and enables researchers to understand complex economic processes.

Copyright of Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung Discussion Papers is the property of Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the Kreisky era (1970–1983), Austrian government debts increased strongly. Historically, the attitude of Kreisky and the Social Democrats towards Keynesian fiscal policy measures to fight unemployment during the oil crises has been held to be responsible for the successive budget deficits. Kreisky's ideological debt policy has become a narrative that has strongly influenced Austrian fiscal policy until today. While this explanation for the strong increase in public debt during the Kreisky era is widely accepted, it is not necessarily true. In this paper, we assess a different explanation: the deficits might simply have resulted from forecast errors of GDP growth in those turbulent times. We find that about one-third of the increase in the debt-over-GDP ratio is directly explained by short-run forecast errors, i.e., the difference between the approved and the realized budget, and an additional one-fifth is the lower bound of forecast error regarding the long-run growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]