Posts filed under ‘Entrepreneurship’
More Bad News for Microfinance
| Peter Klein |
Microfinance and microenterprise have been touted as a new model for economic development, a way to encourage investment, innovation, and business creation and raise living standards without having to go through large-scale industrialization. We’ve tended to be skeptical, however, particularly about the most touted microfinance providers such as the Grameen Bank. Theoretically, the kinds of repayment plays that make microfinance feasible (high interest rates, strong peer monitoring) seem to limit its scope; besides, not everyone wants to be a business owner. The empirical evidence has not been encouraging — microfinance may achieve some social goals, like a sense of empowerment among microenterprise owners, but does not seem to have much impact on overall economic activity. It may not be possible to jump from a largely rural, agrarian society to an entrepreneurial capitalist one without going through a period of large-scale industrial development.
These musings are inspired by a new NBER working paper from the J-PAL group which uses a randomized controlled trial to study the effects of microfinance in an urban Indian setting. The results confirm the suspicions above: access to microfinance brings about some changes in behavior, but has no noticeable effect on standards of living or overall economic performance. Here’s the info:
The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation
Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, Rachel Glennerster, Cynthia G. Kinnan
NBER Working Paper No. 18950, May 2013This paper reports on the first randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing the standard microcredit group-based lending product in a new market. In 2005, half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of a branch of a particular microfinance institution (Spandana) while the remainder were not, although other MFIs were free to enter those slums. Fifteen to 18 months after Spandana began lending in treated areas, households were 8.8 percentage points more likely to have a microcredit loan. They were no more likely to start any new business, although they were more likely to start several at once, and they invested more in their existing businesses. There was no effect on average monthly expenditure per capita. Expenditure on durable goods increased in treated areas, while expenditures on “temptation goods” declined. Three to four years after the initial expansion (after many of the control slums had started getting credit from Spandana and other MFIs ), the probability of borrowing from an MFI in treatment and comparison slums was the same, but on average households in treatment slums had been borrowing for longer and in larger amounts. Consumption was still no different in treatment areas, and the average business was still no more profitable, although we find an increase in profits at the top end. We found no changes in any of the development outcomes that are often believed to be affected by microfinance, including health, education, and women’s empowerment. The results of this study are largely consistent with those of four other evaluations of similar programs in different contexts.
Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
| Peter Klein |
That’s the title of a new review paper by Aaron Chatterji, Ed Glaeser, and William Kerr (a gated NBER working paper, unfortunately). Agglomeration has been a huge issue in the entrepreneurship, technology strategy, innovation policy, and economic growth literatures and it’s nice to have an up-to-date, not-very-technical review paper. (Hopefully there is an ungated copy out there somewhere.)
Clusters of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Aaron Chatterji, Edward L. Glaeser, William R. Kerr
NBER Working Paper No. 19013, May 2013This paper reviews recent academic work on the spatial concentration of entrepreneurship and innovation in the United States. We discuss rationales for the agglomeration of these activities and the economic consequences of clusters. We identify and discuss policies that are being pursued in the United States to encourage local entrepreneurship and innovation. While arguments exist for and against policy support of entrepreneurial clusters, our understanding of what works and how it works is quite limited. The best path forward involves extensive experimentation and careful evaluation.
Update: ungated version here.
AMP Symposium on Private Equity
| Peter Klein |
The new issue of the Academy of Management Perspectives features a symposium, edited by Mike Wright, on “Private Equity: Managerial and Policy Implications.” The symposium includes “Private Equity, HRM, and Employment” by Mike with Nick Bacon, Rod Ball, and Miguel Meuleman; “The Evolution and Strategic Positioning of Private Equity Firms” by Robert E. Hoskisson, Wei Shi, Xiwei Yi, and Jing Jin; and “Private Equity and Entrepreneurial Governance: Time for a Balanced View” by John L. Chapman, Mario P. Mondelli, and me. The symposium came out very nicely, if I may say so, covering a variety of strategic, entrepreneurial, and organizational issues related to private equity firms and companies receiving private equity finance.
In his introduction Mike highlights five main contributions:
First, the papers address the need to consider the systematic evidence on the managerial and strategic aspects of PE, in relation to both portfolio firms and PE firms, which has been largely fragmented if not nonexistent. Second, the papers analyze the impact of PE during economic downturns and demonstrate the underlying resilience of PE-backed portfolio firms. Third, the symposium provides an opportunity to develop insights that compare the managerial impact of PE with different forms of ownership and governance. Fourth, the articles in this symposium highlight the heterogeneity of the private equity phenomenon. Finally, in the context of continuing public attention to PE, which has been heightened by the U.S. presidential race and the global recession, the evidence presented in this symposium paints a rather more positive view than the hyperbole of some of the industry’s critics would suggest. Taken together, these contributions indicate a need for caution in attempts to tighten the regulation of PE lest the economic, financial, and social benefits be lost.
My Response to Shane (2012)
| Peter Klein |
Peter Lewin blogged earlier on the ten-year retrospectives by Scott Shane and Venkataraman et al. on the influential 2000 Shane and Venkataraman paper, “The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research.” As Peter mentioned, Shane acknowledges critics of the opportunity construct such as Sharon Alvarez, Jay Barney, Per Davidsson, and me, but dismisses our concerns as trivial or irrelevant.
The January 2013 issue of AMR includes a formal response by Alvarez and Barney, as well as rejoinders by Shane (with Jon Eckhardt) and Venkataraman (with Saras Sarasvathy, Nick Dew, and William Forster). The dialogue is well worth reading. I didn’t participate in the symposium but do have a brief response to Shane.
My critique of Shane’s work, and the opportunity-discovery perspective more generally, is that the scientific understanding of entrepreneurship has been held back by the focus on opportunities. The basic idea is simple: ”opportunities” do not exist objectively, but are only only subjective images, or conjectures, about future possibilities. They exist in the mind of the entrepreneur, who takes actions to try to bring them about. The very concept of opportunity makes sense only ex post, after actions have been taken and future outcomes realized, leading to realized profits and losses. Under uncertainty, there are no opportunities, only entrepreneurial forecasts, which may turn out to be correct or incorrect. (My critique is slightly different from that of Alvarez and Barney, who argue that some opportunities are “discovered,” but others are “created.” My position is that the whole idea of opportunity is at best redundant, and at worst misleading and harmful.) I maintain that the unit of analysis in entrepreneurship research should be action (investment) under uncertainty, not the discovery (or creation) of profit opportunities.
These arguments are laid out in my 2008 SEJ article and in the Foss-Klein 2012 book. They also came to the fore in a recent exchange with Israel Kirzner, the intellectual father of the opportunity construct. (more…)
Creativity and Property Rights
| Peter Klein |
I haven’t been following the Cato Unbound debate on US copyright law, but Adam Mossoff directs me to Mark Schultz’s post, “Where are the Creators? Consider Creators in Copyright Reform.” Mark thinks current debates over copyright law neglect the role of creativity: “Too often, the modern copyright debate overlooks the fact that copyright concerns creative works made by real people, and that the creation and commercialization of these works requires entrepreneurial risk taking. A debate that overlooks these facts is factually, morally, and economically deficient. Any reform that arises from such a context is likely to be both unjust and economically harmful.” Adam thinks Mark’s position “calls out the cramped, reductionist view of copyright policy that leads some libertarians and conservatives to castigate this property right as ‘regulation’ or as ‘monopoly.’”
As one of those libertarians critical of copyright law, but also an enthusiast for the fundamental creativity of the entrepreneurial act, let me respond briefly. Mark is certainly right that creative works are created by individuals (not, “discovered,” as some of the entrepreneurship literature might lead you to believe). But I don’t see the implications for copyright law. The legal issue is not the ontology of creative works, but the legal rights of others to use their own justly owned property in relation to these creative works. Copyright law is, after all, about delineating property rights, and whether legal protection should be extended to X does not follow directly from the fact that X was “created” instead of “discovered.”
Mark uses the language of entrepreneurship, and I think this argues against his conclusion. Property law protects the property of the entrepreneur, and the ventures he creates, not the stream of income accruing to those ventures. Suppose Mark has the brilliant insight to open a Brooklyn-style deli on a street corner here in Columbia, Missouri, makes lots of money, and then I open a similar shop across the street, cutting into his revenues. No one would argue that I’ve violated Mark’s property rights; the law rightly protects the physical integrity of Mark’s shop, such that I can’t break in and steal his equipment, but doesn’t protect him against pecuniary externalities. The fact that Mark’s restaurant wouldn’t have existed if he hadn’t created it — that “real people make this stuff,” as he puts it — has no bearing on the legality of my opening up a competing restaurant, even though this harms him economically.
Searle Center Conference Innovation and Entrepreneurship:
| Peter Klein |
Northwestern’s Searle Center, headed by Dan Spulber, is holding its sixth annual conference on innovation and entrepreneurship 6-7 June 2013. I have attended before and the papers and discussion are typically very high quality. Proposals are due 15 February. The full call for papers is here and below the fold. (more…)
SMS in Prague
| Peter Klein |
The Strategic Management Society conference has just wrapped up from the lovely city of Prague. Three-fourths of the O&M team,along with several former guest bloggers, enjoyed the festivities. There were many excellent papers, panels, workshops, and social events. Too many to summarize here, but I’ll mention a few highlights:
- A panel organized by good-twin Teppo Felin, “What Are the Big Questions in Strategy?” More on this soon from one of the participants, who used the opportunity to plug his new book shamelessly.
- The Dan and Mary Lou Schendel Best Paper Prize, “to honor substantial work published in the SMJ,” at least five years prior to the award, to Oliver Williamson for his 1991 paper “Strategizing, Economizing, and Economic Organization.”
- A panel on teaching strategic entrepreneurship at the undergraduate, MBA, and PhD levels. I covered the third of these; my slides are here.
- A “common ground” session on “Austrian Economics and Creative Destruction,” demonstrating the growing interest in the Austrian school among management and organizational scholars.
I also participated in a pre-conference workshop on career strategy, and was asked to talk about social media. Should PhD students and untenured assistant professors blog, tweet, share professional information on Facebook, etc.? I said I could see no evidence that a social media presence had hurt any young scholar; quite the contrary, blogs (like this one) and other, appropriate, uses of social media, can enhance a scholar’s presence and reputation. I argued that it’s a mistake to view these as competing with serious research; after all, it’s not like someone’s going to say, “I was going to complete a major research article today, but decided to send a tweet instead.” Rather, judicious use of blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is a complement to serious research. I think of it as water-cooler or lunch-table chatter with colleagues. You learn about people’s broader interests, their sense of the field, what topics they think are particularly interesting, what they’re reading, etc. Professionals like to know this about each other. Learning these sorts of things about colleagues certainly doesn’t make you think less of them!
There’s much more to report — including an episode of me impersonating a female colleague — but that will have to wait for a future post.
Interesting Paper on Entrepreneurship and Growth
| Peter Klein |
Does entrepreneurship cause economic growth, or do high growth rates stimulate entrepreneurship? Ed Glaeser, Sari Pekkala Kerr, and William Kerr have an interesting new paper that uses the presence of heavy industry to instrument for the population of potential entrepreneurs (using startups as the proxy for entrepreneurship).
Entrepreneurship and Urban Growth: An Empirical Assessment with Historical Mines
Edward L. Glaeser, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr
NBER Working Paper No. 18333, August 2012Measures of entrepreneurship, such as average establishment size and the prevalence of start-ups, correlate strongly with employment growth across and within metropolitan areas, but the endogeneity of these measures bedevils interpretation. Chinitz (1961) hypothesized that coal mines near Pittsburgh led that city to specialization in industries, like steel, with significant scale economies and that those big firms led to a dearth of entrepreneurial human capital across several generations. We test this idea by looking at the spatial location of past mines across the United States: proximity to historical mining deposits is associated with bigger firms and fewer start-ups in the middle of the 20th century. We use mines as an instrument for our entrepreneurship measures and find a persistent link between entrepreneurship and city employment growth; this connection works primarily through lower employment growth of start-ups in cities that are closer to mines. These effects hold in cold and warm regions alike and in industries that are not directly related to mining, such as trade, finance and services. We use quantile instrumental variable regression techniques and identify mostly homogeneous effects throughout the conditional city growth distribution.
Cooking as Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
To honor Julia Child on her 100th birthday, Lynne Kiesling writes a nice post combining three of my favorite things: cooking, entrepreneurship theory, and Austrian economics. Good cooking is about the combination of heterogeneous resources, it requires experimentation and creativity, and it either works or it doesn’t. Most important:
A system that will yield the most valuable and pleasing combinations of entrepreneurial economic or cooking activities will have low entry barriers (anyone can try to cook!) and a robust feedback-based system of error correction. Low entry barriers facilitate creativity in discovering new useful products from the raw elements, as well as enabling new value creation when some of those raw elements change. Error correction, whether a “yuck, that’s gross!” at home or a lack of profits due to low repeat business at a restaurant, is most effective and valuable when there are feedback loops that can inform the cook-producer about the value that the consumer did or did not get from the dish.
This emphasis on error correction highlights one of my differences with Kirzner’s approach to entrepreneurship. In Kirzner’s system, which emphasizes entrepreneurship as a coordinating agency, the entrepreneur is modeled as “piercing the fog” of uncertainty — hence the familiar metaphor of entrepreneurship as the discovery of preexisting profit opportunities. My approach focuses on action, not discovery, and gives a larger role to uncertainty. What generates coordination, in this approach, is the entrepreneurial selection process, not the “correctness” of entrepreneurial decisions.
Incidentally, Saras Sarasvathy often uses cooking to illustrate her “effectual” approach to entrepreneurial decision-making (i.e., cooks don’t always follow a recipe to produce a known dish, but use the ingredients they have in a sequential, experimental process). And for more on food, see here and here.
Obama on Small Business
| Peter Klein |
President Obama’s gaffe about business creation — “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen” — has been met with the usual reactions. Defenders claim he simply used infelicitous language to describe the vital role of government in providing essential goods, while critics point out, for instance, that he didn’t even get it right on the Golden Gate Bridge (which received no federal money). I actually feel sorry for the guy. It was an pretty dumb thing to say, politically, and may end up hurting him more than Romney’s role in “exporting American jobs” (gag) hurts the challenger.
The idea that no one builds a business on his own, without help from other people, is in once sense trivially true, as Leonard Read never tired of explaining. No one person knows how to make a pencil, let alone a microprocessor. As a defense of government spending on infrastructure (not only roads and bridges, but things like the internet), it falls completely flat. Of course some entrepreneurs profit from government spending on infrastructure — not just directly (e.g., road contractors, engineering companies hired by ARPA, etc.) but indirectly (from lower transportation or transmission cost, net of tax payments). But such anecdotes do not at all “justify” the expenditures. As I once wrote about the internet:
[E]nthusiasts tend to forget the fallacy of the broken window. We see the internet. We see its uses. We see the benefits it brings. We surf the web and check our email and download our music. But we will never see the technologies that weren’t developed because the resources that would have been used to develop them were confiscated by the Defense Department and given to Stanford engineers. Likewise, I may admire the majesty and grandeur of an Egyptian pyramid, a TVA dam, or a Saturn V rocket, but it doesn’t follow that I think they should have been created, let alone at taxpayer expense.
A gross benefit to particular entrepreneurs from a government program does not, by itself, demonstrate net benefits to the taxpaying community. Vague references to spillovers and multipliers may sound good in a press conference, but are no substitute for serious analysis.
Hardware Matters
| Peter Klein |
Joe Salerno’s post at Circle Bastiat, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Cloud,” could have been an entry in our nothing new under the sun series. Joe highlights a recent HBR blog piece on the physical footprint and energy requirements of server farms, showing that success in the digital age depends, for some players, on access to tangible capital assets and energy. There are important implications:
The notion of a world without scarcity is thus usually propagated by leftist social theorists–but not always. There were some libertarian futurists around in the early 1970s. But lately many libertarians are among the vanguard of those who, dazzled by the marvels of the Digital Age, argue that many goods have become costlessly and, therefore, infinitely producible. Without government interference, they contend, humankind will be able to satisfy more and more of their wants using the resources freely available inside the Cloud.
Our Post-Scarcity libertarians should tell this to the owners of the 500,000 data centers, which contain the hundreds of millions of servers worldwide that constitute the real and indispensable infrastructure of the Cloud.
There are also the wires, cables, switches, cell towers, and client machines (PCs, smartphones, tablets, etc., not to mention smart refrigerators, cars with OnStar, thermostats, and more) that give us access to the cloud. To be sure, Moore’s law allows us to consume this hardware as never before. But software without hardware is like, hmmmm, peanut butter without jelly, Sonny without Cher, a Tim Burton movie without Johnny Depp. Notes Joe: “Once again, common sense observation of the real world reveals the ceaseless struggle of human actors to economize on the use of resources and vindicates the old and true economics of scarcity.”
Entrepreneurship and the Auteur Theory
| Peter Klein |
I’ve been reading Jack Mathews’ The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam v. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut, a fascinating — if absurdly one-sided — look at director Terry Gilliam’s struggle to get his 1985 film Brazil distributed in the US. Mathews tells the story as a noble crusade by a brilliant, iconoclastic, visionary filmmaker against the evil studio system, run by corporate toadies who care only about making money, even if it means destroying the artistic unity of the filmmaker’s creative vision. Gilliam had “final cut” rights for a version released in Europe, but his US distributor, Universal, demanded substantial edits, which Gilliam refused to make. Universal, led by Sid Sheinberg (who comes across heroically in documentaries about Steven Spielberg’s Jaws), was completely within its contractual rights to insist on these changes, but the result was a very different film that has been lampooned by critics. (The Sheinberg version was canned and an alternate Gilliam version eventually shown in the US after a long, ugly, public battle between Gilliam and the studio.)
It’s great reading for those interested in movies and the business of making movies. But there’s an interesting entrepreneurship angle as well. Most film critics, including author Mathews, accept the auteur theory of cinema, which sees movies as the highly personal products of a director’s creative vision. The studio approach, which treats moviemaking as a collaborative enterprise designed to make money, is anathema to the auteurs. The case is usually made with familiar anecdotes: 24-year-old Orson Welles had final control over Citizen Kane and created one of the medium’s great masterpieces, while RKO destroyed the follow-up Magnificent Ambersons (and all of Welles’s subsequent films). The studios thought Star Wars would flop, and after George Lucas made his zillions he decided to finance and produce his subsequent films on his own, without studio interference — the dream of every auteur. American art-house darlings like Robert Altman, Peter Bogdonavich, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, etc. are always portrayed as fighting to keep Hollywood from turning their edgy, original films into bland, corporate drivel pitched at suburban soccer moms.
As Paul Cantor and others have explained, however, the auteur theory is bunk. Moviemaking is, in fact, a collaborative venture, and many of the best films are studio pictures created by large teams — the best example being Casablanca, which was essentially written by committee. Or, as Cantor puts it: “Just three words: Francis Ford Coppola.” (The Godfather films were studio pictures; virtually everything Coppola did since, with the partial exception of Apocalypse Now, has been a disaster.) And take George Lucas: Does anybody think the problem with the prequel trilogy was too many people standing around saying, “George, you can’t do that”?
Consider the parallels with entrepreneurship. (more…)
Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment: Kindle Edition Now Available
| Peter Klein |
Here’s the link — and the price is right, just $16.50!
According to the latest sales figures, we’re up to #1,070,026 on Amazon. So close to the top spot! Incidentally, my sole-authored Capitalist and the Entrepreneur is just behind at #1,210,245, suggesting that the market places only a small value on the marginal Foss contribution. That’s the correct inference, right?
Reminder: “Alternative Investments” Proposals due 15 June
| Peter Klein |
Reminder: Proposals for the Managerial and Decision Economics special issue on “Effects of Alternative Investments on Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth” are due 15 June 2012. Don Siegel, Nick Wilson, Mike Wright, and I are editing the special issue and organizing a paper-development conference 29 October 2012 at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan. Click the link above or go here for further details. We look forward to your submissions!
IT and Higher Ed
| Peter Klein |
Joshua Gans’s Forbes piece on Stanford’s online game theory course brought up a larger point about higher education. I’ve been involved in various online, distance, web-based educational activities for many years. When designing an online course, the typical professor imagines each element of a traditional course, then creates a virtual equivalent. I.e., paper syllabus = html syllabus; books, articles, handouts = pdf files; classroom lecture = webcast lecture; office hours = chat session; pen-and-paper exams = online exams; and so on. The elements are exactly the same as before; only the method of delivery has changed.
This is almost certainly the wrong way to leverage the information technology revolution. The pedagogy is exactly the same. But isn’t this just what we would expect of entrenched incumbents? The record companies didn’t create iTunes. The online New York Times is pretty much like the paper New York Times; it took Google and Flipboard and other innovators to revolutionize the newsreading business. 
As we’ve noted before, isomorphism and stasis is exactly what we would expect from a protected cartel — disruptive innovation, in the Christensen sense, will almost certainly come from outside. (Hopefully after Yours Truly is comfortably retired.)
Darden Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Conference
| Peter Klein |
The Darden Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Conference is now underway in Charlottesville, Virginia. Keynote and roundtable sessions will be streamed on the conference website.
Time to Say Goodbye, but Not Really
| Peter Lewin |
After a most enjoyable and productive tour as a guest blogger on this site (at least for me), the time has come to say goodbye.
I do so at an auspicious moment, having just received my copy of Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment. This book brings together important work by two of the hosts of this site in a very accessible format that promises to spread their message to many who have yet to hear it. To understand the firm one must understand entrepreneurship and vice versa. We live in a dynamic world in which individual judgments concerning the value of resources and the path of future events play a key role and organizational structures develop to give traction to those judgments. For an unrepentant Austrian subjectivist like me it is all very exciting. I look forward to observing further developments as an observer and casual participant on this blog, and elsewhere.
I would like to warmly thank the hosts of this blog Dick, Nicolai, Lasse, and Peter for extending to me the invitation to participate and look forward to ongoing productive associations with all of them.
And If You Can’t Teach, Teach Gym
| Peter Klein |
Kate Maxwell, writing at Growthology, is concerned about the distance between those who do entrepreneurship and those who teach or research entrepreneurship:
In my reading of the entrepreneurship literature I have been struck by the large gap between entrepreneurs and people who study entrepreneurship. The group of people who self select into entrepreneurship is almost entirely disjoint from the group of people who self select to study it. Such a gap exists in other fields to greater and lesser degrees. Sociologists, for instance, study phenomenon in which they are clearly participants whereas political scientists are rarely career politicians but are often actors in political systems.
But in the case of entrepreneurship the gap is cause for concern. My sense is that all too often those studying entrepreneurship don’t understand, even through exposure, the messy process of creating a business, nor, due to selection effects, are they naturally inclined to think like an entrepreneur might.
I agree entirely with this description, but am not sure I understand the concern. Kate seems to assume a particular concept of entrepreneurship — the day-to-day mechanics of starting and growing a business — that applies only to a fraction of the entrepreneurship literature. Surely one can study the effects of entrepreneurship on economic outcomes like growth and industry structure without “thinking like an entrepreneur.” Same for antecedents to entrepreneurship such as the legal and political environment, social and cultural norms, the behavior of universities, etc. Even more so, if we treat entrepreneurship as an economic function (alertness, innovation, adaptation, or judgment) rather than an employment category or a firm type, then solid training in economics and related disciplines seems the main prerequisite for doing good research.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that entrepreneurship scholars shouldn’t talk to entrepreneurs or study their lives and work. Want to know how if feels to throw the winning Superbowl pass? Ask Tom Brady or Eli Manning. The stat sheet won’t tell you that. But this doesn’t mean that only ex-NFL players can be competent announcers, analysts, sportswriters, etc. Similarly, I like to read about food, and have enjoyed the recent memoirs of great chefs like Jacques Pépin and Julia Child. These first-hand accounts are full of unique insights and colorful observations. But there are plenty of great books on the restaurant industry, on the relationship between food and culture, on culinary innovation, etc. by authors who couldn’t cook their way out of a paper bag.
What do you think?
CFP: Bricolage in Art and Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
Bricolage — doing the best you can with the materials on hand, rather than choosing and end and getting the resources you need — is an important concept in the contemporary entrepreneurship literature. Garud and Karnøe’s influential 2003 paper on the Danish wind power industry helped bring bricolage into the mainstream, and it has important parallels with effectuation and other approaches to entrepreneurship that emphasize experimentation and incremental learning.
The University of Missouri’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures is hosting an interdisciplinary conference, 12-13 November 2012, on bricolage in art and entrepreneurship, focusing on the work of Ediciones Vigía, a unique artists’ collective that produces limited edition handmade books by Cuban and international authors and musicians. Participants will come not only from the humanities, education, and journalism, but also economics, management, and entrepreneurship. Among the featured speakers are Ivo Zander, who recently co-edited a book on Art Entrepeneurship, and Sharon Alvarez.
O&M readers interested in the relationship between business and the arts, the parallels between artistic creativity and entrepreneurial creativity, the economic organization of artist networks, and related issues should check it out. The full call for papers, along with related information, is below the fold.
Lazear and Spletzer on Creative Destruction
| Peter Klein |
What labor economists call “churn” is an important part of creative destruction, the combining and recombining of productive resources as business entities appear and disappear. New paper:
Hiring, Churn and the Business Cycle
Edward P. Lazear, James R. Spletzer
NBER Working Paper No. 17910
Issued in March 2012Churn, defined as replacing departing workers with new ones as workers move to more productive uses, is an important feature of labor dynamics. The majority of hiring and separation reflects churn rather than hiring for expansion or separation for contraction. Using the JOLTS data, we show that churn decreased significantly during the most recent recession with almost four-fifths of the decline in hiring reflecting decreases in churn. Reductions in churn have costs because they reflect a reduction in labor movement to higher valued uses. We estimate the cost of reduced churn to be $208 billion. On an annual basis, this amounts to about .4% of GDP for a period of 3 1/2 years.
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