Items by Peter Klein

• The Professor and the Princess

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Writes my source: “Madeleine is the youngest of the three royal children and referred to as the ‘party princess.’ Is that why he looks scared?” Posted in - Klein -, People [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 11, 2009, 10:24am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Words of Wisdom from Williamson’s Banquet Speech

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | The transcript is here. My favorite bit, which can be read as a response to the econ-bashers: Being hard-headed means that we aspire to tell it like it is — be it good news or bad. Although we take no joy in the downside, it is our duty [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 10, 2009, 6:41pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Boeing and the Higgs Effect

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | In their calls for greatly expanding the Federal Reserve System’s and Treasury Department’s roles in the economy, Chairman Bernanke, Secretaries Paulson and Geithner, and their academic enablers have repeatedly emphasized the temporary nature of these “emergency” measures. “History is full of examples in which the policy responses [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 09, 2009, 2:41pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Mechanism Design and the Office Holiday Party

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Holiday office parties, far from being a waste of time (and booze), can be effective screening mechanisms, according to information forwarded by Doug French: The Banc Investment Group’s “Banc Investment Daily” email report from December 6, 2005, urged its banker readers to turn the troops loose at the [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 09, 2009, 10:43am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Rejecta Mathematica

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 4
  | Peter Klein | Rejecta Mathematica is an open-access journal featuring papers rejected by peer-reviewed mathematics journals. Each article includes an author’s statement describing the peer-review experience and explaining why the paper shouldn’t have been rejected. Great concept! (Link from Sheen Levine via Konstantina Kiousis.) I eagerly await the first issues of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 08, 2009, 5:05pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Williamson Nobel Lecture Is Streaming Now

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Watch it here. Money quotes so far: After questioning the design of the Department of Homeland Security: “The US has a Council of Economic Advisers; I look forward to the day when there’s also a Council of Organizational Advisers” [paraphrase]. “That brings us to the ‘remediableness’ criterion. That word doesn’t [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 08, 2009, 10:06am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Becker and Posner on Williamson and Organizational Economics

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Ruminations on the field of organizational economics from Becker and Posner. Both are inspired by Williamson’s Nobel but neither discusses his contributions very directly. Posner’s comment, the longer of the two, describes some of his own work (with Luis Garicano) on public organizations. PS: I’ve been looking for [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 07, 2009, 5:38pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Internal and External Corporate Governance

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Most of the corporate governance literature focuses on external mechanisms for limiting managerial discretion: competition in product and factor markets; discipline from banks, institutional investors, and other large capital suppliers; and, of course, the market for corporate control. Firms have access to internal control mechanisms as well [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 07, 2009, 11:34am EST
  by Peter Klein

• The WSJ on Vertical Integration

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | It’s not as bad as this 2006 piece from Slate, but Monday’s WSJ front-pager, “Companies More Prone to Go ‘Vertical,’” is underwhelming at best. It shares a few interesting anecdotes about recent vertical mergers, but falls flat on two major grounds. First, like the Slate piece, it [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 04, 2009, 2:55pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• My Naïveté

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | I hoped Christy Romer would be a voice of reason within Obama’s economic team. What was I thinking? If yesterday’s WSJ op-ed is any indication, her role has been reduced to that of cheerleader for the President’s preposterous “stimulus” program. The editorial is a string of banalities, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 03, 2009, 2:58pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• The Lazy Manager Theory

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 7
  | Peter Klein | Good ideas from John Wilkins, who earned a PhD in (I think) evolutionary biology while working as a full-time manager (via Randy). Sample elements of the Lazy Manager Theory: Never do any piece of paperwork when the person who asked for it isn’t there and holding it when [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 03, 2009, 8:37am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Israel Strategy Conference

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | This year’s Israel Strategy Conference has an impressive lineup, featuring Jay Barney on “The Missing Conversation in Strategic Management,” Mike Hitt  on “Strategic Management: Taking Stock and Looking Forward,” Anita McGahan on “The Agenda for Strategic Management: Implications of the Economic Crisis,” and Harbir Singh on “Creating [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 01, 2009, 6:28pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Nirvana Fallacy Alert, #2,535 in a Series

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Another mistake in John Cassidy’s ditty on externalities is the claim that Pigou “was reacting against laissez faire — the hands-off approach to policy that free market economists, from Adam Smith onwards, had recommended. Such thinkers had tended to view the market economy as a perfectly balanced, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: December 01, 2009, 9:49am EST
  by Peter Klein

• North on Ostrom and Williamson

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Douglass North welcomes fellow new institutionalists Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson to the Nobel Club (via Jeffrey Huang): Posted in - Klein -, New Institutional Economics, People [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 30, 2009, 4:33pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Opening Lines I Wish I’d Written

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Last week was tough for Shakespeare scholars who wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and sip sherry in the faculty lounge. You know, the people otherwise known as Saab drivers. That’s from a Friday WSJ piece on GM’s attempt to dump its Saab subsidiary. Readers outside the [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 29, 2009, 12:01am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Bebchuk-Weisbach Survey of Corporate Governance

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | It’s the introduction to a special issue of the Review of Financial Studies: The special issue features seven papers on corporate governance that were presented in a meeting of the NBER’s corporate governance project. Each of the papers represents state-of-the-art research in an important area of corporate governance [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 27, 2009, 6:55pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• More Graduate Student Humor

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Found this posted on a classroom wall in our building. Not quite as witty as this one, but then again, we keep them heavily sedated: On a more serious note, here’s a conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of Coase’s landmark 1959 and 1960 papers, with an all-star lineup. Posted [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 26, 2009, 10:30pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Modest, Slow, Molecular, Definitive

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | In an oft-cited passage from The Mechanisms of Governance (1996), Williamson describes the research program of transaction cost economics this way: Transaction cost economics (1) eschews intuitive notions of complexity and asks what the dimensions are on which transactions differ that present differential hazards. It further (2) asks [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 24, 2009, 1:12am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Financing Constraints and Entrepreneurship

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | Speaking of banks, here’s a very good survey of the entrepreneurship literature on financing constraints by William Kerr and  Ramana Nanda, just out from NBER. From the introduction: The first research stream considers the impact of financial market development on entrepreneurship. These papers usually employ variations across regions [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 23, 2009, 9:48am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Things Professors Don’t Know

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 10
  | Peter Klein | Useful information for undergraduate instructors, provided by students, from the Chronicle (via Ross Emmett). Sample: There is no need to put those “just for fun” optional readings on the syllabus. We will never read them. If I even see the word “optional” my eyes glaze over and I [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 18, 2009, 12:29pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Peter Bernstein Interview

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Speaking of Peters, the McKinsey Quarterly site has a video interview with the late Peter Bernstein on risk. Bernstein was a deep thinker and an excellent writer. I once found myself on a plane next to an investment banker who was reading Bernstein’s Against the Gods. I [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 18, 2009, 12:23pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Keynesian Anti-Economics

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 4
  | Peter Klein | A reader objected to my recent portrayal of Keynes as a crank, as a man who never really studied economics or took it very seriously. Note that I never denied Keynes’s intellect, his great skill as a rhetorician, or his personal charm. But Keynesian economics is, in [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 17, 2009, 4:40pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• My Career in One Sentence

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Geoff Manne to me and others: “The Intel-AMD settlement, over an alleged Sherman Act Section 2 violation, seems to violate Section 1 of the same act. I’ve written an informed and thoughtful blog post on this. What do you think?” Me: “This is further evidence that antitrust law [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 17, 2009, 12:11pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• What Would Peter Say?

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | Peter Drucker, that is. The great management guru died in 2005 — and even then, he didn’t blog, unlike some other guys named Peter. If Drucker were alive today, what would he say about the financial crisis, health-care reform, climate change, and the other Big Issues of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 16, 2009, 10:23am EST
  by Peter Klein

• The Amazing Krugman

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 10
  | Peter Klein | The man indeed has a unique talent, as described here by the witty and clever Steve Landsburg: It’s always impressive to see one person excel in two widely disparate activities: a first-rate mathematician who’s also a world class mountaineer, or a titan of industry who conducts symphony orchestras [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 14, 2009, 10:15am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Fed Independence and Comparative Institutional Analysis

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | I’ve written before on Fed “independence” and why I don’t support it. The vast majority of economists, especially the more prominent ones, are strongly in favor of independence and against Congressional attempts to limit the Fed’s discretion in monetary and regulatory policy. The standard argument is that [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 13, 2009, 3:58pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Incentives Matter, Football Helmet Edition

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | Latest example of the Peltzman Effect, courtesy of the WSJ: “Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet?” E.g.: “[W]hile [hard-shell] helmets reduced the chances of death on the field, they also created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged players to collide more forcefully and more often.” [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 11, 2009, 5:56pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Cochrane on Krugman

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | John Cochrane tackles Paul Krugman’s infamous essay (via Casey Mulligan). My own view of the crisis (and of macroeconomics) is different from Cochrane’s, but his skewering of Krugman is delightful, and there are many nuggets of wisdom. A few snippets: Crying “bubble” is empty unless you have an [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 11, 2009, 10:31am EST
  by Peter Klein

• The MSM Rediscovers the Classics

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | The rediscovery of Keynes is one of the official storylines of the financial crisis and global recession. The problem is that Keynes was, in my judgment, a charlatan, a clever man obsessed with his own cleverness who never paid serious, thoughtful attention to economics (or any subject). [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 10, 2009, 11:11pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• No Required Ethics Course at Chicago-Booth

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Bucking the trend, the Chicago-Booth MBA program will not offer required courses in business ethics (via Cliff). The school “has no set standard for ethical case studies used in the classroom,” according to Executive Director of Faculty Services Lisa Messaglia,”but leaves it up to faculty, instead.” [T]he business [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 10, 2009, 10:12am EST
  by Peter Klein

• The Guest Bloggers Are Dead; Long Live the Guest Blogger!

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Today we say thanks, and farewell, to guest bloggers Russ Coff and Glenn MacDonald for their thoughtful and provocative posts (archived here and here), and we welcome Craig Pirrong as our newest guest blogger. Craig is Professor of Finance and Energy Markets Director of the Global Energy [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:33pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• CFP: International Perspectives on Corporate Governance

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Posted on behalf of Alex Padilla: CALL FOR PAPERS Journal of Private Enterprise & Association for Private Enterprise Education Symposium on Corporate Governance: International Perspectives Guest Editors: Alexandre Padilla, Nishat Abbasi, and Pierre Garello Metropolitan State College of Denver & University Paul Cézanne Association for Private Enterprise Education International Conference Las Vegas, Nevada, April 11-13, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 08, 2009, 10:23pm EST
  by Peter Klein

• Coasean Humor

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | The grad students in my department recently cleaned up their student lounge. Some wag, remembering a line from my course — Coase’s famous dismissal of the “old” institutional economists — tagged a stack of  papers thusly: Posted in - Klein -, New Institutional Economics [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 07, 2009, 2:07am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Citation Format Pet Peeve

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Many thanks to June Flanders for expressing, on the HET listserv, one of my own pet peeves about citation formats: using the reprint date, rather than the original date, in the in-text citation: At the risk of sounding school-marmerish I should like to raise an issue that has [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 06, 2009, 9:21am EST
  by Peter Klein

• CFP: “Institutions in Economic Thought”

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | That’s the theme for the next meeting of the Charles Gide Association for the Study of Economic Thought (ACGEPE), to be held at the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne, 27-29 May 2010. Steve Medema, Malcolm Rutherford, and O&M friend Claude Ménard are the keynote speakers. Proposal deadline is [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 05, 2009, 12:28am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Teaching Large Classes

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | Advice on teaching large introductory classes, from a Facebook friend of a Facebook friend: Stick with the stories! Walter Heller made it all the way through introductory macro at Minnesota entirely on stories from his days in the Kennedy Administration. I don’t recall him actually mentioning the word [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 04, 2009, 9:49am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Sidak and Teece on Dynamic Competition

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | A “neo-Schumpeterian” framework for antitrust analysis that favors dynamic competition over static competition would put less weight on market share and concentration in the assessment of market power and more weight on assessing potential competition and enterprise-level capabilities. By embedding recent developments in evolutionary economics, the behavioral [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: November 03, 2009, 8:35am EST
  by Peter Klein

• Multitasking

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | I was flipping channels last night and came across a Jimi Hendrix biopic. Lots of concert footage, with Hendrix doing his usual amazing Hendrix things — singing, crazy guitar riffs, playing with his teeth. Then I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: He’s doing all this while [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 30, 2009, 11:30am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• How Machiavellian Are You?

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | A test for university presidents, deans, department heads, center directors, etc. (via Anu). (Yes, of course, there are management and leadership literatures on old Niccolò. Don’t act surprised!) Posted in - Klein -, Management Theory, People [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 29, 2009, 9:59am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• My Favorite New-Media Entrepreneur

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | It’s Ben Huh, the brains behind FAIL Blog, Engrish Funny, and, of course, I Can Has Cheezburger. The best of the user-generated-content sites. Huh is profiled here in Fast Company. Interestingly, he’s a quant guy: [W]e rely on the tools of the Internet — metrics and measurements and [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 28, 2009, 10:10am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Sampling on the Dependent Variable: French Peasant Edition

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | A useful example of the methodological flaw that plagues the “great companies” and “great leaders” literature in management, from Graham Robb’s excellent The Discovery of France (Norton, 2007): [N]early every autobiographical account of ordinary life in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France comes from the early chapters of memoirs written [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 25, 2009, 6:40pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Hodgson Petition

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 8
  | Peter Klein | Several friends and colleagues urged me to sign Geoff Hodgson’s petition on the financial crisis, but I declined. I agree with Krugman that economists have tended to mistake mathematical beauty for truth, but think this has little to do with the financial crisis. As discussed in previous [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 23, 2009, 9:33am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Penrose (1959) Golden Anniversary

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | This year marks the 50th anniversary of Edith Penrose’s Theory of the Growth of the Firm (1959), one of the most important and influential books on the firm and firm strategy. To celebrate, Yasemin Kor and Christos Pitelis organized  a roundtable at last week’s SMS conference with [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 21, 2009, 4:36pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Other Brushes with Official Greatness

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | In the spirit of Lasse’s post, here are stories about some of my other direct and indirect contacts with academic royalty, people whose achievements have nothing to do with anything I’ve ever said or done. As regular O&M readers know, there is a history of disagreement between Ronald [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 19, 2009, 4:23pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Secret to Writing Student Essays

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Thanks to PB for this one. Posted in - Klein -, Teaching [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 19, 2009, 9:49am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Best Part About Winning a Nobel Prize at Berkeley

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | I might not believe it if I hadn’t seen these parking spaces — in very choice locations — with my own eyes. (Thanks to Peter H. for the link.) The spaces are marked with special signs that read: “Reserved For NL/Special Permit Required At All Times.” That “NL,” [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 17, 2009, 5:54pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Williamson’s “Economics of Institutions” Syllabus

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | I was pretty clueless when I started graduate school. I had good undergraduate training in economics, and had the privilege of attending my first Austrian seminar, where I met Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Roger Garrison, and David Gordon, before beginning graduate work. But I really didn’t know [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 16, 2009, 3:33pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Wodehouse

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | We interrupt Williamson Week to remind you that today, 15 October, is the birthday of the great P. G. Wodehouse. If I were really clever I’d write something like “Principal-Agent Conflicts between Wooster and Jeeves” or “Lord Emsworth as Charismatic Leader,” but the best I can do [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 15, 2009, 5:42pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Williamson and the Austrians

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | My short piece on Williamsonian transaction cost economics and its relationship to the Austrian approach is up on Mises.org. Posted in - Klein -, Austrian Economics, New Institutional Economics, Theory of the Firm [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 14, 2009, 4:18pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Williamson Miscellany, Continued

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | 5. Many useful summaries of Williamson’s (and Ostrom’s) contributions are appearing online, such as those by Ed Glaeser, David Henderson, John Nye, Jeff Ely, and Alex Tabarrok. I think the first few pages of my “make-or-buy” chapter in the NIE Handbook provide a decent overview too. I [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 14, 2009, 3:14pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Hoisted from the Comments: Hoopes on Williamson

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Former guest blogger David Hoopes’s comment deserves its own post: So, we’re leaving the serious discussion to our goody two-shoes organizations twin? Was Will Mitchell a Williamson student? No one has said anything about Teece. Teece’s early JEBO articles did a great job talking about economies of scope [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 13, 2009, 4:36pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Williamson Miscellany

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 7
  | Peter Klein | 1. I’ve been at the SMS conference, and traveling, and haven’t had a chance to read the vast blogospheric commentary on Williamson (and Ostrom). Those looking for an introduction to Williamson’s work will find good stuff in the forthcoming Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics, including an [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 13, 2009, 10:25am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Williamsoniana

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | My, we live in a fast-paced world: the Nobel announcement is just a few hours old, and we’re already being taken to task for not blogging enough about Williamson. For the high-time-preference folks, please see previous posts on Williamson and transaction cost economics, and the preview chapters [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 12, 2009, 1:44pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• It’s Williamson, at Last!

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 10
  | Peter Klein | A hearty congratulations to Oliver Williamson, co-recipient (along with Elinor Ostrom) of this year’s Nobel Prize in economics. As Williamson’s former PhD student, I’m thrilled beyond belief. The O&M crew have all been heavily influenced by Williamson (and, to a some degree, Ostrom too) and will have [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 12, 2009, 8:15am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Ashley Judd and Bob Lucas

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | The lovely and talented Ashley Judd was the celebrity guest this morning on NPR’s “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!” (Ashley and I have a close personal connection, she being a junior-high-school classmate of my wife’s younger brother. Can’t get closer than that.) She answered trivia questions about [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 10, 2009, 10:39pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Fate of Famous Economists

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | Even very famous ones. The Dundee Courier (what, you don’t read it?) reports that Adam Smith’s gravestone, in the courtyard of Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, is in bad shape: “Smith’s gravestone could be in danger of deterioration after years of exposure to the elements, vandalism and neglect” [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 09, 2009, 10:09am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Nobel Stuff

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 8
  | Peter Klein | Because O&M is an econ-themed blog, I guess we’re obligated to post something about next week’s Nobel prize announcement. I confess I don’t follow the buzz that closely; the committee’s picks often make little sense to me and there are better things to do with one’s time. [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 08, 2009, 12:54pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Masters of Finance

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | The American Finance Association has assembled a terrific set of video interviews and lectures with eminent financial economists including Markowitz, Sharpe, Samuelson, Merton, Scholes, Arrow, Fama, and Myers. (HT: Fama/French.) Posted in - Klein -, Business History, Corporate Governance, Financial Markets, History of Economic Thought, People, Teaching [...][...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 08, 2009, 9:54am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The First Secretary of Agriculture

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Mises.org has posted Frank Chodorov’s 1952 classic, “Joseph, Secretary of Agriculture”: The dream plan worked wonders — for Pharaoh and his secretary of agriculture. . . . On the other hand, it is told how a delegation of Egyptians came to Joseph and declared: “Thou hast saved our [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 06, 2009, 4:42pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Management Miscellany

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 6
  | Peter Klein | 1. We are not big on Jim Collins here at O&M but Toyota president Akio Toyoda is a fan, explaining his company’s woes in terms of Collins’s five stages of business decline. (Is “be headquartered in a country with an overvalued currency” one of the stages?) 2. Karen [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 04, 2009, 5:10am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Tweets of the Great Economists

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 4
  | Peter Klein | Cliff sent me Andrew Pessin’s “Twitter Tour of Western Philosophy.” Samples: “Socrates: Drinking hemlock; toes tingling; legs getting numb. Maybe unexamined life worth living? Guard!” “Plato: Symposium 2nite 7pm, @ The Cave. Open mike, open bar. Under 21 admitted free.” “Schopenhauer: All is empty, pointless. Deep, dark [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 02, 2009, 11:29am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Stewart Macaulay

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Here’s a lecture I wish I could have attended: Stewart Macaulay gave today’s Annual Distinguished Lecture at BYU Law School. Macaulay, as noted in BYU’s blurb, is “an internationally recognized scholar and a leader of the law-in-action approach to contracts.  He pioneered the study of business practices [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: October 01, 2009, 11:50pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | Mike Sykuta and I are editing a volume for the Elgar Companion series, The Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics. The volume is currently in production with an expected publication date in mid-2010. We’ve created a page here on O&M with more information, including a table of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 30, 2009, 12:41pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Most Interesting Scholar in the World

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 4
  | Peter Klein | With apologies to Dos Equis: His work would pass peer review . . . if he had peers. Students take his classes, just because they find them interesting. His main intellectual predecessor . . . is himself. His Erdős number is negative. He once rejected one of his own articles, just to [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 29, 2009, 8:20am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Dallas Cowboys Edition

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | In Alchian and Demsetz’s (1972) nexus-of-contracts approach to the firm, bosses don’t necessarily hire workers; workers may just as easily hire bosses. Recall Cheung’s (1983, p. 8) famous illustration: “My own favorite example is riverboat pulling in China before the communist regime, when a large group of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 27, 2009, 3:18pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Nerd Rap

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein| Weird Al’s version — already deconstructed by our friends at orgtheory.net — has style, but the CERN Rap has substance. As do these econ vids. Posted in - Klein -, Ephemera [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 26, 2009, 6:32pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Soviets Really Did Have a Doomsday Machine

  —Organizations and Markets

  Enclosure: [download]

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | According to the new issue of Wired (via the Economist), the Soviets really did have a doomsday machine and, as in Dr. Strangelove, didn’t tell anyone about it. Interestingly, the interpretation is that the Soviets, like Schelling’s rational addict, were directing the credible commitment not toward their [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 25, 2009, 1:08am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Page and Reference Counts: AER versus AJS

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | Thanks to Teppo for linking to these interesting graphs. Since 1960, the page count and reference list of the average American Journal of Sociology article have risen dramatically, while those for the American Economic Review have remained about the same. I’d be curious to see these figures [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 24, 2009, 12:42pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• John Gray on the Greenspan-Bernanke Economy

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | From Gray’s April 2009 NYRB review of Margaret Atwood’s Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth: Concepts of debt figure centrally in Western religion, while the notion that debt is something to be avoided, or incurred with caution, has long been important in Western capitalism. Without institutions [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 24, 2009, 9:47am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Uncle Miltie on Economic Communication

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 5
  | Peter Klein | No, not Milton Friedman, but John Milton. See “Areopagitica: Milton’s Influence on Classical and Modern Political and Economic Thought” by Isaac M. Morehouse in the excellent new online journal Libertarian Papers. Says Morehouse: Milton’s work has something to teach economists not only in its content but in its [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 23, 2009, 9:43am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Another Economist Gets a Genius Award

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | This year it’s Esther Duflo, leader in the experimental approach to poverty reduction. She joins past economist-MacArthur fellows Matt Rabin, Avner Greif, Kevin Murphy, Nancy Folbre, Michael Kremer, and (way back in 1983, Alice Rivlin). Posted in - Klein -, People [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 22, 2009, 10:05am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Niche Markets for Obsolete Technologies

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | One of the most interesting papers I saw presented at this year’s ACAC meeting was Ron Adner and Daniel Snow’s “‘Old’ Technology Responses to ‘New’ Technology Threats: Demand Heterogeneity and Graceful Technology Retreats.” They show how incumbents sometimes react to disruptive innovation by repositioning the old technology [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 21, 2009, 1:57pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Famous Misquotes

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | What are your favorite famous misquotes in social science? E.g., everybody knows Lord Acton’s dictum: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Except he actually wrote “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Likewise, Adam Smith didn’t say that the merchant is led “as if [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 17, 2009, 5:33pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Introducing Guest Blogger Glenn MacDonald

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | It’s a pleasure to welcome Glenn MacDonald as our newest guest blogger. Glenn is the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics and Strategy at the Olin Business School, Washington University in St. Louis, and Director of the Center for Research in Economics and Strategy. His recent [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 16, 2009, 10:12am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Two Quotations on Profits

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Henry Hazlitt, from Economics in One Lesson: In a free economy, in which wages, costs and prices are left to the free play of the competitive market, the prospect of profits decides what articles will be made, and in what quantities — and what articles will not be [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 15, 2009, 4:26am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Onion or Reality: Ron Kirk Edition

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Today’s installment of our series featuring statements so self-evidently absurd you wonder how anyone could have made them with a straight face focuses on US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. Here’s Captain Kirk failing Economics 101: Following an announcement by the White House, United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 12, 2009, 7:15pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Professorial Role Models

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 4
  | Peter Klein | Mine is of course Professor Kingsfield from “The Paper Chase”: Best line: “Loud! Fill the classroom with your intelligence.” My co-bloggers are of course warm-and-fuzzy types. Anybody have a clip of the scene from One True Thing where the Renee Zellweger character remembers visiting her father’s classroom as a [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 11, 2009, 10:27am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Corporate Diversification Humor

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | As someone who works in the corporate diversification area I enjoyed this Onion piece on Yamaha: Despite concerns over the recent global recession, Yamaha Corporation president Mitsuru Umemura announced last week that he was content with the current level of production of Jet Skis, alto saxophones, snowmobiles, power [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 09, 2009, 11:50am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Blogging About the Academic Job Market

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Political science profs don’t like it. The passage on job-market-rumor sites caught my eye in this Inside Higher Ed piece on the poli sci market (via Randy). One change in the hiring process that is clearly frustrating to many graduate directors and search chairs is the popularity of [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 08, 2009, 1:53pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Books About Work

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 7
  | Peter Klein | I blogged earlier about Matthew Crawford, whose book Shop Class as Soulcraft challenges our commonly held beliefs about white- and blue-collar work. In a feature in Saturday’s WSJ Crawford listed his five favorite books about work. It’s an unusual list: Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital, Alasdair [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 07, 2009, 1:08am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Who Says Data-Visualization Tools Aren’t Useful?

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | When they can produce beauties like this map of time-travel timelines from movies and TV? (Not quite as awesome as the Heavy Metal Band Names Flow Chart but still pretty cool.) HT: /Film. Bonus: Here’s another one, from John Hagel, that many of you will appreciate. Posted in - [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 05, 2009, 12:23pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Bayes of Our Lives

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | I’ve already shared my Bayesian anecdote. On a more serious note, Andrew Gelman is asked (by Bill Harris) to recommend overviews of Bayesian methods for practitioners (analysts, managers). Andrew provides several helpful suggestions. Any others? Any recommendations for teaching Bayesian (or classical) statistics to MBAs, executives, even [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 03, 2009, 10:16am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Chalk or Dry-Erase Markers?

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 6
  | Peter Klein | I just committed a rookie teacher faux pas: wearing a black shirt to class in a room equipped with old-fashioned chalk and chalkboards. I do PowerPoint, but use the boards to make additional points and to guide Socratic discussion. Now I look like Woody Allen in the [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: September 01, 2009, 5:45pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 Easy Steps

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | This is floating around the web and good for a chuckle. The situation in social science is in some ways better and in other ways worse than that described here (the author claims it’s based on a true story). Our journals are not quite as space constrained, [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 31, 2009, 6:19pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Amish Internet

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | It’s the Budget, a 119-year-old Amish weekly newspaper published in Sugarcreek, Ohio. “The Budget is the dominant means of communication among the Amish, a Christian denomination with about 227,000 members nationwide who shun cars for horse-drawn buggies and avoid hooking up to the electrical grid,” says an [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 29, 2009, 2:56pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Twitter for Professors

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | For the loquacious, in other words. (Via Chris Dannen.) Posted in - Klein -, Ephemera [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 27, 2009, 2:36pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• History of Economic Thought Boot Camp

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | A message from Bruce Caldwell: I am pleased to announce that the Center for the History of Political Economy at Duke University has been awarded a grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities to support a Summer Institute to be held at Duke June 6 – 25, 2010. The institute [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 27, 2009, 1:30pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Interviews with Nobel Laureates

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | I just discovered that the official Nobel site has a multimedia section, with interviews, videos of the ceremonies and acceptance speeches, and so on. Most of the recent economics Laureates are included. Interesting stuff. Bonus Nobel material: Josh Wright makes a good case for an economics prize honoring [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 26, 2009, 11:06am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Even Stanley Fish . . .

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | . . . recognizes that politicizing the basic English composition classes — one of the crowning achievements of literary and cultural postmodernism, the movement once championed by Fish himself — wasn’t such a good idea (via George Leef): A few years ago, when I was grading papers for [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 26, 2009, 9:36am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• The Pretense of Bernanke’s Knowledge

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Chairman Bernanke, in his own words: July 2005: “[U]nquestionably, housing prices are up quite a bit; I think it’s important to note that fundamentals are also very strong. We’ve got a growing economy, jobs, incomes. We’ve got very low mortgage rates. We’ve got demographics supporting housing growth. We’ve [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 25, 2009, 12:23pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• A Hopeful Sign

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | At least one major US bank is advertising the fact that it refused TARP funds. Bernanke and Co. must be unhappy, as they insisted that all large banks take the money to avoid tainting those that actually needed it. Wouldn’t it be great if the largest bailout [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 24, 2009, 3:44pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Discipline-Based Policy Advice

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | As noted before, the economist long ago replaced the fortune teller as the most popular kind of policy adviser. The US, for example, has a Council of Economic Advisers but no Council of Anthropological Advisers or Council of Critical Literary Theorist Advisers (thank goodness). Now the sociologists [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 24, 2009, 12:56pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• What Does the Rule of Law Variable Measure?

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | Bill Easterly poses this question, referring to his NYU colleague Kevin Davis’s work on law and development. Davis has several papers criticizing economists’ use of rule-of-law variables in development research (1, 2, 3). As summarized by Easterly: Kevin points out that two current measures of “rule of law” [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 21, 2009, 10:32am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Postrel on Competitive Advantage

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | Former guest blogger Steve Postrel gave an interesting presentation at last week’s AoM Professional Development Workshop on competitive advantage: “Competitive Advantage: Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without It.” Steve sent me the slides and was happy to share them here. Add your questions and comments below. Steve [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 21, 2009, 10:01am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Bruce Kogut on the Daily Show

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | Nicolai Facebooked this the other day but neglected to share it with the wider blogosphere. The clip made me laugh out loud. Of course, I don’t agree with the premise, that business schools are responsible for the current crisis (and that the MBA Oath, which we discussed [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 20, 2009, 9:53am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Rose Friedman and Frank Knight

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 1
  | Peter Klein | You probably heard that Rose Friedman died yesterday. I haven’t read the Friedmans’ memoir and didn’t know, until Ross Emmett and Greg Ransom pointed it out yesterday, that Rose had been Frank Knight’s research assistant at Chicago and was planning a PhD dissertation on capital theory. She [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 19, 2009, 10:44am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Greif’s Response to Rowley

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | Avner Greif has written a response to Charles Rowley’s odd claim that Greif “denied Janet Landa her full intellectual property rights with respect to her contributions to the economic analysis of trust and identity.” Public Choice, which published Rowley’s critique, will run the reply. Avner kindly sent [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 18, 2009, 11:35pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Times Are Tough

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 2
  | Peter Klein | At the University of Southern Mississippi, which is responding to the economic crisis by eliminating its economics department (Tomas Sjostrom via Sandeep Baliga). Even tenured faculty will go Stanford dumped its Food Research Institute (where a good friend of mine was employed) about a decade ago, also terminating [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 18, 2009, 3:06pm EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Your Vote Counts After All!

  —Organizations and Markets

  Number of comments: 3
  | Peter Klein | The average American had a 1-in-60 million chance of affecting the outcome in the last Presidential election. Boy, do I feel bad! Posted in - Klein -, Ephemera [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 18, 2009, 10:50am EDT
  by Peter Klein

• Mintzberg Interview

  —Organizations and Markets

  | Peter Klein | A short interview with Henry Mintzberg, mostly about his forthcoming book Managing, in today’s WSJ (not sure if it is gated). Best line: I talk about what I call “the inevitably flawed manager.” We’re all flawed, but basically, effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under [...]
  Share | Rate | Archive

  Posted: August 17, 2009, 2:43pm EDT
  by Peter Klein