nep-knm New Economics Papers
on Knowledge Management and Knowledge Economy
Issue of 2026–06–22
three papers chosen by
Laura Nicola-Gavrila, Centrul European de Studii Manageriale în Administrarea Afacerilor


  1. British trading companies and tacit knowledge seeding: diversifying Japanese industrialisation, 1906–1918 By Learmouth, Tom
  2. Frontier Knowledge in College and Student Success By Barbara Biasi; Song Ma
  3. Regime-Adaptive Continual Learning for Portfolio Management By Chaofan Pan; Lingfei Ren; Linbo Xiong; Yonghao Li; Wei Wei; Xin Yang

  1. By: Learmouth, Tom
    Abstract: This paper analyses the broadening out of Japanese industrialisation into new sectors after the Russo-Japanese War. It does so by compiling new evidence to analyse the emergence of a rubber industry in Kobe – one which later swept global markets with rubber footwear in the inter-war period. Rubber manufacturing knowledge was seeded in Japan by British trading company H. & W. Greer, who established factories in Kobe for J. G. Ingram and Dunlop. In a process adhering closely to Steven Klepper’s heritage theory, workers who had acquired tacit rubber compounding knowledge from Ingram and Dunlop formed a string of Japanese spin-off firms which clustered around the two factories. This study emphasises the role of firm-specific foreign knowledge compatible with local conditions in latecomer development. It also improves our understanding of the role of British trading companies in the global spread of industrial knowledge during the first era of globalisation.
    Keywords: Japenese industrialisation; British trading companies; rubber industry; Kobe; H. & W. Greer; J. G. Ingram; Dunlop; heritage theory
    JEL: N0 R14 J01
    Date: 2026–05–25
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138071
  2. By: Barbara Biasi; Song Ma
    Abstract: We study whether exposure to frontier knowledge in college affects student outcomes. Combining 459, 415 syllabi from seven Texas public universities with 107 million publications and linked student records, we measure each course’s proximity to recent versus older research in its field. Exploiting syllabus updates unobserved at enrollment, we find that frontier exposure increases completion, GPA, graduate-school attendance, and earnings, and reduces time-to-degree. Completion, GPA, and progression gains are broad, while graduate-school and earnings returns are larger for students with stronger preparation and family resources. The evidence suggests two mechanisms: frontier content keeps students engaged, and sustained exposure builds labor-market skills.
    JEL: I23 I24 I26 J24 O33
    Date: 2026–05
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35269
  3. By: Chaofan Pan; Lingfei Ren; Linbo Xiong; Yonghao Li; Wei Wei; Xin Yang
    Abstract: Financial markets are inherently non-stationary, exhibiting frequent regime shifts and structural changes that render traditional Portfolio Management (PM) approaches ineffective. Existing remedies, such as rolling-window retraining and naive online fine-tuning, are hindered by high computational costs and insufficient knowledge utilization, respectively, resulting in low returns and limited adaptability. Continual learning (CL) offers a promising paradigm by enabling trading agents to accumulate and transfer knowledge across sequential tasks. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Re}gime-aware \textbf{C}ontinual \textbf{A}daptive \textbf{P}ortfolio management (\textbf{ReCAP}), a novel framework that integrates CL into PM to address the challenges of dynamic financial environments. ReCAP employs an adaptive regime detection module to segment historical market data into variable-length regimes, enabling regime-specific learning of policy vectors and the construction of a policy library. During continual trading, a regime-gate module adaptively combines policy vectors from the library based on the current market state, facilitating rapid adaptation to newly detected regimes. Only the regime-gate and the current regime's policy vector are continually updated to preserve useful knowledge effectively. Extensive experiments on five real-world datasets demonstrate that ReCAP consistently outperforms popular baselines, achieving superior returns in long-term investment horizons and rapid adaptation to regime shifts.
    Date: 2026–05
    URL: https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2606.00143

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