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  • The Igon Value of Football

    | Dick Langlois | My last post implicitly lauds the science reporting of the New York Times. And I think they generally do a good job. But, still basking in the glow of UConn’s remarkable football win over Notre Dame on Saturday, I am reminded of a – presumably unintentionally – [...]
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    Posted: November 24, 2009, 3:34pm EST
    by Dick Langlois

  • Modest, Slow, Molecular, Definitive

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

  • Financing Constraints and Entrepreneurship

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

  • Further My Last

    | Craig Pirrong | My previous post on the Acharya et al (AEFLS) assertion of the purported externality in bilateral OTC markets focused on whether there was actually an unpriced “bad.” I judged otherwise based on the fact that credit and counterparty risks are repriced repeatedly (and ruthlessly). There is another reason [...]
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    Posted: November 22, 2009, 10:25am EST
    by cpirrong

  • Nirvana is Just a Band

    | Craig Pirrong | Last week I wrote about one justification for exchange trading and clearing mandates in derivatives markets — the market power argument. This week I’ll examine another argument, and render a similarly skeptical verdict. In a chapter of Restoring Financial Stability, Viral Acharya, Rob Engle, Steve Figlewski, Anthony Lynch [...]
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    Posted: November 20, 2009, 9:11pm EST
    by cpirrong

  • The Igon Value of Cognitive Dissonance

    Number of comments: 6
    | Dick Langlois | Some of you may have seen Steven Pinker’s review of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book in the New York Times this weekend. Pinker praises Gladwell’s writing and his instinct for interesting topics, but skewers him for his bad grasp of the underlying science of what he writes about, [...]
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    Posted: November 19, 2009, 2:28pm EST
    by Dick Langlois

  • Selection à la Banks

    Number of comments: 2
    | Lasse Lien | Ideally, the competitive process would select for productivity. It doesn’t actually do that. Presumably it selects for expected profitability, which is close enough — assuming market power isn’t too common. What has the economy been selecting for in the past year or so? The state of low [...]
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    Posted: November 19, 2009, 8:39am EST
    by Lasse

  • Things Professors Don’t Know

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

  • Peter Bernstein Interview

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

  • Keynesian Anti-Economics

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

  • My Career in One Sentence

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: November 17, 2009, 12:11pm EST
    by Peter Klein

  • What Would Peter Say?

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

  • The Amazing Krugman

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

  • Fed Independence and Comparative Institutional Analysis

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

  • Just So Stories: Financial Regulation Edition

    Number of comments: 1
    | Craig Pirrong | All of the legislative proposals relating to over-the-counter derivatives would impose seismic changes on the way that these instruments are traded, and the performance risks related to them are managed. Indeed, it is fair to say that these proposals, if implemented would dramatically shrink the OTC market, [...]
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    Posted: November 12, 2009, 8:45pm EST
    by cpirrong

  • Incentives Matter, Football Helmet Edition

    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.” [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2009, 5:56pm EST
    by Peter Klein

  • On the Border*

    Number of comments: 1
    | Craig Pirrong | This is my inaugural post as guest blogger here at O&M. I am grateful for the opportunity. In his very gracious introduction, Peter Klein noted that my research is at the border of finance and industrial organization. Quite true (and indeed, “borderer” is a good description of me [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2009, 4:32pm EST
    by cpirrong

  • Cochrane on Krugman

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

  • The MSM Rediscovers the Classics

    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). [...]
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    Posted: November 10, 2009, 11:11pm EST
    by Peter Klein

  • No Required Ethics Course at Chicago-Booth

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

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

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: November 09, 2009, 10:33pm EST
    by Peter Klein

  • CFP: International Perspectives on Corporate Governance

    | 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, [...]
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    Posted: November 08, 2009, 10:23pm EST
    by Peter Klein

  • Coasean Humor

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

  • Citation Format Pet Peeve

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

  • CFP: “Institutions in Economic Thought”

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: November 05, 2009, 12:28am EST
    by Peter Klein

  • Teaching Large Classes

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

  • The Limits of Antitrust Revisited

    | Dick Langlois | I also just returned from an interesting conference, this one at the Searle Center at Northwestern Law School. The topic was the 25th anniversary of Frank Easterbrook’s 1984 paper “The Limits of Antitrust.” Here’s the agenda. I don’t think the papers are all available online, but the [...]
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    Posted: November 03, 2009, 10:10am EST
    by Dick Langlois

  • Sidak and Teece on Dynamic Competition

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

  • Cultural Economics Conference in Copenhagen

    | Nicolai Foss | My colleague Dr. Trine Bille is the organizer of next year’s “International Conference of the Association of Cultural Economics International” in Copenhagen (CBS).  Here is the Call. Submit a paper! Posted in - Foss -, Ephemera [...]
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    Posted: November 02, 2009, 10:08am EST
    by Nicolai Foss

  • Pomo Periscope XIX: Leiter on Foucault

    Number of comments: 3
    | Nicolai Foss | Here is a nice discussion of Foucault by UChicago Law School professor Brian Leiter. It is not a smashing per se, but rather a critical discussion that indicates a central flaw in Foucault’s philosophy. Leiter points to Foucault’s well known discussion of the “pretence” of the “human sciences,” something Foucault seems to explain on [...]
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    Posted: November 02, 2009, 8:40am EST
    by Nicolai Foss

  • Tracking A Moving Arrow Core

    | Nicolai Foss | As argued by Nelson and Winter in their 1982 book, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, and more explicitly by Winter and Gabriel Szulanski in their 2001 paper, “Replication as Strategy,” many firms leverage their competitive advantages by means of replication. Franchise chains come immediately to mind [...]
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    Posted: November 01, 2009, 1:53pm EST
    by Nicolai Foss

  • Terence Hutchison Special Issue

    Number of comments: 2
    | Nicolai Foss | It is a sad fact that I spent a considerable part of my early 20s browsing the pages of the major economics journals of the interwar period. I was particularly interested in what was then called the “monetary theory of the trade cycle” and the role of [...]
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    Posted: November 01, 2009, 9:33am EST
    by Nicolai Foss

  • Governing Firm-Specific Knowledge Assets

    Number of comments: 1
    | Nicolai Foss | In spite of book titles such as Competitive Advantage Through People, a whole subfield dedicated to linking human resources and firm-level performance outcomes (i.e., strategic HRM), and a general recognition that many knowledge-based competitive advantages are ultimately rooted in a web of complementary and firm-specific human capital, surprisingly [...]
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    Posted: October 31, 2009, 7:25am EDT
    by Nicolai Foss

  • Multitasking

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

  • Economic Methodology in Erkenntnis

    Number of comments: 2
    | Nicolai Foss | Economic methodology, or, meta-theoretical discussion of (and in) economics, has gone significantly beyond with theme that many practicing economists associate with the field, namely the realism-of-assumptions theme prompted by Friedman’s famous 1953 essay, “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” Of course that theme is by no means unimportant, [...]
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    Posted: October 29, 2009, 12:30pm EDT
    by Nicolai Foss

  • How Machiavellian Are You?

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

  • My Favorite New-Media Entrepreneur

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: October 28, 2009, 10:10am EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Internal Capital Market Activeness

    Number of comments: 3
    | Lasse Lien | In these Williamsonian times, here is a nice new working paper relevant to his  internal capital market hypothesis. The paper measures, in various ways, how active a firm is in reallocating capital across its businesses. The paper finds that the more active a firm is, the lower the firm’s industry-adjusted [...]
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    Posted: October 27, 2009, 10:22am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Sampling on the Dependent Variable: French Peasant Edition

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

  • The Hodgson Petition

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

  • Making and Unmaking Economic Orders

    | Dick Langlois | The new issue of the online journal Capitalism and Society has a number of articles that should interest readers of this blog. Each is probably deserving of its own post. (Ah, but time prohibits.) Jon Elster has a piece called “Excessive Ambitions” that criticizes not only mainstream rational-choice [...]
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    Posted: October 22, 2009, 1:41pm EDT
    by Dick Langlois

  • Penrose (1959) Golden Anniversary

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

  • Other Brushes with Official Greatness

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: October 19, 2009, 4:23pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Secret to Writing Student Essays

    Number of comments: 1
    | Peter Klein | Thanks to PB for this one. Posted in - Klein -, Teaching [...]
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    Posted: October 19, 2009, 9:49am EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Best Part About Winning a Nobel Prize at Berkeley

    | 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,” [...]
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    Posted: October 17, 2009, 5:54pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Williamson’s “Economics of Institutions” Syllabus

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

  • Wodehouse

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: October 15, 2009, 5:42pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Williamson and the Austrians

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

  • Williamson Miscellany, Continued

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

  • Hoisted from the Comments: Hoopes on Williamson

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

  • Williamson Miscellany

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

  • Wiliamson Linking with Guile

    Number of comments: 3
    | Lasse Lien | Now that Williamson got what he deserved, the race is on to associate oneself as  closely as possible with the great man (Williamson linking with guile). Some try to link him to their research field, saying that he is really in sociology, strategy, organization theory, IO, or whatever is their own field. Some go [...]
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    Posted: October 13, 2009, 5:59am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Williamsoniana

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

  • Ripped from the Headlines

    Number of comments: 1
    | Dick Langlois | In my European Economic History class this morning, I was talking about the medieval open-field system. As I always do, I made Ostrom’s point that the medieval open fields were not an example of the tragedy of the commons and were not over grazed. And, in talking [...]
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    Posted: October 12, 2009, 1:13pm EDT
    by Dick Langlois

  • It’s Williamson, at Last!

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

  • Ashley Judd and Bob Lucas

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

  • The Fate of Famous Economists

    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” [...]
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    Posted: October 09, 2009, 10:09am EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Need Examples of Subversive Behavior in M&A

    Number of comments: 2
    | Russ Coff | I just finished teaching a simulation exercise to BBA students on the politics of post-acquisition integration. I was surprised that students had a great deal of trouble believing that managers would be subversive even in that kind of setting. If there are specific examples of such subversive [...]
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    Posted: October 08, 2009, 5:25pm EDT
    by russcoff

  • Nobel Stuff

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

  • Masters of Finance

    | 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 [...][...]
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    Posted: October 08, 2009, 9:54am EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • The First Secretary of Agriculture

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: October 06, 2009, 4:42pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Bentham and Hume in the West Wing

    Number of comments: 2
    | Dick Langlois | From a perhaps uncharacteristic source — David Brooks at the New York Times — comes a funny and spot-on column about Bentham and Hume as present-day DC policy advisors. The people on Mr. Bentham’s side believe that government can get actively involved in organizing innovation. . . . [...]
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    Posted: October 06, 2009, 8:31am EDT
    by Dick Langlois

  • Management Miscellany

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

  • Tweets of the Great Economists

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

  • Stewart Macaulay

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: October 01, 2009, 11:50pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics

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

  • The Most Interesting Scholar in the World

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

  • Alchian and Demsetz (1972), Dallas Cowboys Edition

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

  • Nerd Rap

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: September 26, 2009, 6:32pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • QWERTY in the Long Run

    Number of comments: 3
    | Dick Langlois | The new issue of Industrial and Corporate Change has an article by Andreas Reinstaller and Werner Hölzl called “Big Causes and Small Events: QWERTY and the Mechanization of Office Work.” Although it’s an interesting paper in many respects, I think it fails in its avowed aim to [...]
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    Posted: September 25, 2009, 2:20pm EDT
    by Dick Langlois

  • The Soviets Really Did Have a Doomsday Machine

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

  • Page and Reference Counts: AER versus AJS

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

  • John Gray on the Greenspan-Bernanke Economy

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

  • Uncle Miltie on Economic Communication

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

  • Another Economist Gets a Genius Award

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: September 22, 2009, 10:05am EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Niche Markets for Obsolete Technologies

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

  • Bankrupt Bankruptcy

    Number of comments: 3
    | Glenn MacDonald | The US bankruptcy process is designed to be an orderly way to preserve any value that is left in the bankrupt business, and treat the creditors fairly and consistent with their contractual rights. This process has been honed through use and generally functions highly effectively. The point [...]
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    Posted: September 18, 2009, 8:45am EDT
    by glennmmacdonald

  • A New Negative Externality

    Number of comments: 5
    | Lasse B. Lien | If you haven’t been brilliant lately, here is a possible explanation. It’s not at all your fault, it’s just that your colleagues are too good-looking. Note, though, that this excuse can apparently only be used by men. Abstract: The present research tested the prediction that mixed-sex interactions may [...]
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    Posted: September 18, 2009, 6:16am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Famous Misquotes

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

  • Climate Change Economics

    Number of comments: 10
    | Glenn MacDonald | Some thoughts about how carbon emissions will evolve. Assume carbon emissions cause climate change. (Obviously this is controversial. But I have nothing new to add to this and so am willing to grant this assumption.) There are two fundamental economic forces at work. One is that emissions [...]
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    Posted: September 16, 2009, 10:14am EDT
    by glennmmacdonald

  • Introducing Guest Blogger Glenn MacDonald

    | 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 [...]
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    Posted: September 16, 2009, 10:12am EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • Two Quotations on Profits

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

  • The Onion or Reality: Ron Kirk Edition

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

  • Professorial Role Models

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

  • Skewness in Journal Rankings

    Number of comments: 3
    | Lasse Lien | Here is an interesting piece about journal rankings in economics (abstract below). See also Steve Phelan’s comment and link about similar issues in management (#3). Nearly all journal rankings in economics use some weighted average of citations to calculate a journal’s impact. These rankings are often used, formally [...]
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    Posted: September 10, 2009, 5:40am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Corporate Diversification Humor

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

  • Blogging About the Academic Job Market

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

  • The Roadmap to Success

    Number of comments: 4
    | Lasse Lien | Here it is. The roadmap to success. I guess it was Bohemianism that sealed my fate. BTW: Peter, you’ll be glad to know that apparently there is no sidetrack for blogging. (Via Flowingdata) Posted in - Lien -, Ephemera [...]
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    Posted: September 08, 2009, 9:33am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Books About Work

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

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

    | 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 - [...]
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    Posted: September 05, 2009, 12:23pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • What’s Wrong Here?

    Number of comments: 10
    | Lasse Lien | A rich tourist came to a small town in the middle of the financial crisis. He went into the local hotel, placed a 200-dollar bill on the counter and went upstairs to check out what kind of rooms the hotel had to offer. In the meantime the [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 8:50am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Rankings and Journal Competition

    Number of comments: 5
    | Lasse Lien | Like many other B-schools, mine has a bonus system for publications in top journals. Every so often this list gets revised, which generates heated debate as each academic discipline tries to get more of “its” journals on the bonus list. One recent suggestion was to drop all the in-fighting [...]
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    Posted: September 04, 2009, 8:18am EDT
    by Lasse

  • Not Even the Slightest Soupçon of Correlation

    Number of comments: 2
    | Dick Langlois | Another interesting article from the Journal of Wine Economics: The lead article is again by Robert T. Hodgson, who analyzes the reliability of Gold medals awarded at 13 California Wine Fairs. “An analysis of over 4000 wines entered in 13 U.S. wine competitions shows little concordance among the [...]
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    Posted: September 03, 2009, 10:30am EDT
    by Dick Langlois

  • Bayes of Our Lives

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

  • Wanted: Human Capital Research(ers)

    | Russ Coff | Human Capital Interest Group? First a self-serving announcement. I’m part of an effort to create a new SMS interest group on Human Capital & Competitive Advantage (HC&CA). I need to gauge interest and identify people who would want to be involved if the proposal moves forward. We need [...]
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    Posted: September 01, 2009, 6:46pm EDT
    by russcoff

  • Chalk or Dry-Erase Markers?

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

  • How to Publish a Scientific Comment in 123 Easy Steps

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

  • The Amish Internet

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

  • Twitter for Professors

    Number of comments: 1
    | Peter Klein | For the loquacious, in other words. (Via Chris Dannen.) Posted in - Klein -, Ephemera [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 2:36pm EDT
    by Peter Klein

  • History of Economic Thought Boot Camp

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