Archive for 21 April 2007
Media, Dummy Variables, Fame, Fathers of Sociology, and School Shootings
| Chihmao Hsieh |
By now, all readers of this blog are probably well-aware of the massacre at Virginia Tech that took 33 lives. (My own prayers go out to all those affected by the tragedy.)
Some controversies are bound to be re-visited during and after the investigation (e.g. gun control) but others are starting to reveal themselves as mainstream for the first time. Namely, the media itself may be promoting these types of shootings. (more…)
Athey on Organizational Complementarities
| Peter Klein |
Harvard’s Susan Athey has won the John Bates Clark medal. Commentators are hailing her age (one of the youngest Clark medalists at 36), gender (the first female winner), and reputation (profiled in the New York Times as a 24-year-old PhD candidate). Here I’ll offer a few remarks about one of her most important papers for organizational scholars, “An Empirical Framework for Testing Theories About Complementarity in Organizational Design” (with Scott Stern). (An NBER version of the paper is here; as far as I know it is still unpublished.)
I blogged recently about complementarities among organizational form, technology, and market conditions. Athey and Stern’s paper tackles the problem of measuring complementarities among organizational practices. If particular practices occur in clusters (as modeled, for example, by Holmstrom and Milgrom, 1994), it is difficult to estimate the marginal impact of adopting any particular practice. Moreover, the endogeneity of the decision to adopt individual practices makes it difficult to judge whether practices are in fact complementary (i.e., performance enhancing). Athey and Stern develop a method for identifying complementarities by constructing “activity-specific instruments” that control for unobserved heterogeneity. The proposed approach, which jointly estimates the adoption decision and the productivity effect of organizational practices, is becoming increasingly influential in the empirical literature on organizational design. (more…)
Does Your Neighborhood Really Need Traffic Signs?
| Chihmao Hsieh |
A month ago, I was traveling and spotted on a newsstand the then-current issue of US News & World Report, the one where the cover story addresses what societal lessons the USA could learn from the rest of the world. Being born and raised in the USA for 30 years, I found this to be one of the unusually humble headlines by a US publication, and picked a copy up.
The news article reports on 30 short accounts of societal behaviors or conditions elsewhere, which the US should envy. Major differences in sociocultural norms and regulatory policies are evidenced.
The first such account profiles recent policymaking in Ipswich, England, where that city’s traffic planner has removed all traffic signs (including traffic lights and even curbs!) in an effort to reduce traffic accidents. (more…)
Organizations and Markets 
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