| Peter Klein |
Next Tuesday, 13 May, is the proposal deadline for the 2008 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data. I participated in the 2007 version and got a lot out of it. This year’s event takes place in Washington, DC instead of Kauffman headquarters in Kansas City.
Documents from the 2007 symposium can be reviewed at SSRN.
A personal note: While driving to last year’s symposium I found myself on Kansas City’s Volker Boulevard, named for the great philanthropist William Volker, whose support was instrumental in the rebirth of Austrian economics in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. The Volker Fund paid all or part of the salaries of Mises at NYU and Hayek at Chicago and employed Murray Rothbard as a consultant, book reviewer, and talent scout while he was writing Man, Economy, and State and America’s Great Depression. Wikipedia has some background information on the Volker Fund; you can find more in Hülsmann’s Last Knight (pp. 867-68 and passim) and Brian Doherty’s Radicals for Capitalism (pp. 181-87 and passim). In Kansas City Volker is remembered as a generous philanthropist who supported schools and hospitals, developed a program for prison reform, and was a major benefactor of the University of Kansas City (now the University of Missouri - Kansas City).
It would be nice to have a full-scale Volker biography. Anybody up to the task? Volker’s company and foundation records are housed at UMKC. Herb Cournelle wrote a short biography in 1951, Mr. Anonymous: The Story of William Volker, but I haven’t been able to locate a copy.
7 May 2008
| Peter Klein |
June is an exciting month for O&Mers looking for research conferences. First up is ACAC 2008, 12-14 June in Atlanta. ACAC, which has received high marks on this blog, is an annual workshop organized by Rich Makadok emphasizing the “big issues” in strategic management. Next is the DRUID 25th Anniversary Conference, 17-20 June in Copenhagen, with the theme of “Entrepreneurship and Innovation.” The distinguished participant list includes Rajshree Agarwal, Carliss Baldwin, Bo Carlsson, Kathy Eisenhardt, Maryann Feldman, Bronwyn Hall, Steve Klepper, Anita McGahan, Joanne Oxley, Olav Sorenson, Scott Stern, Sid Winter, and some Foss guy. Immediately afterward is ISNIE’s 12th annual meeting, 20-21 June, in Toronto. I am on the program committee, working with president-elect Scott Masten, and we got a bunch of great submissions this year. Barry Weingast and Robert Ellickson are keynoters. The preliminary program should be up on the ISNIE website soon.
Also, for graduate students in economics, history, philosophy, political science, business administration, and related disciplines there’s the Rothbard Graduate Seminar, 13-18 June in Auburn, Alabama. The RGS is an intensive workshop and research seminar on Austrian economics that uses Murray Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State as its core text. I am one of the discussion leaders.
If I could teleport I’d attend all four!
11 March 2008
| Peter Klein |
The Institute Bruno Leoni, named for the great classical liberal legal scholar, announces a seminar for young scholars (under 35 years old) on competition, regulation, and antitrust. It’s 3-5 October, 2008, in Sestri Levante (Italy). Economists, sociologists, philosophers, legal scholars, and historians are encouraged to apply. Here is the call for papers. Bill Niskanen and Steve Littlechild are the keynoters. Other than the blatant ageism, it looks like a great event.
15 February 2008
| Peter Klein |
Some interesting papers from the ASSA Meeting in New Orleans, where I’ll be spending the next couple of days. (I don’t have links, so you’ll have to do your own Googling to find the texts.)
ROBERT GIBBONS and REBECCA HENDERSON, Massachusetts Institute of Technology — What Do Managers Do? Suggestive Evidence and Potential Theories about Building and Managing Relational Contracts
CLAUDE MENARD, ATOM - University of Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne — The Governance of Interfirm Agreements: A Relational Contract Perspective
RICARD GIL, University California-Santa Cruz, and JEAN-MICHEL OUDOT, ATOM - University Paris Pantheon-Sorbonne — Contractual Completeness and Ex-post Efficiency: Trade-Offs between Ex-Ante and Ex-Post Costs in Contract Design
LUIS GARICANO and PAUL HEATON, University of Chicago — Information Technology, Organization, and Productivity in the Public Sector: Evidence from Police Departments
DANIEL SPULBER, Northwestern University — Entrepreneurs in the Theory of the Firm (more…)
4 January 2008
| Peter Klein |
The BYU Conference on Comparative Organizations at Sundance begins today. Your humble correspondent is here, along with Teppo, Brayden, Fabio, and Omar of orgtheory.net, Gordon Smith of Conglomerate, and luminaries from throughout the world of organization studies. I haven’t yet seen Robert Redford (but if he shows up I’ll ask him to clarify his views on property rights).
This is an interdisciplinary conference, though the participants are primarily sociologists (with a few outsiders, like yours truly, thrown in for comic relief). The purpose is to develop better frameworks for making comparisons across organizational types. From the conference blurb: “[C]ontemporary organizational scholarship can not provide a coherent answer to questions regarding how one might translate corporate data on the predictors of employee motivation into a hospital or military setting, or to what extent conclusions regarding the relationship between financial performance and socially responsible business practices based on studies of small, young, private firms hold for large, old, public firms.”
I think there is actually a fair amount of empirical literature in organizational economics and strategy making these kinds of cross-sectional comparisons (public versus private firms, venture-backed versus non-venture-backed startups, M-form versus H-form conglomerates, etc.). The analysis is not particularly “deep,” however; it relies generally on reduced-form models with performance as the only dependent variable. I’m looking forward to learning about more nuanced approaches.
28 September 2007
