Comments for Organizations and Markets

Comment on Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation by Mario Rizzo

Mario Rizzo — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:01:28 +0000

My dissertation in 1977 was basically ONE longish essay on crime and property values. I was not only ahead of the times then but ahead of the times now.

Comment on Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation by Randy

Randy — Wed, 22 May 2013 23:07:11 +0000

Two observations.
(1) Daring, innovative,careful, admirable, notable, … dissertations can be of either form, depending upon the quality of the student, the advisor, and the examining committee. Since the requirement is not to have the essays published prior to defending, we do not need to worry about AER or QJE editors-as-sticks-in-the-mud.
(2) The best reason to choose the 3-essay model was ignored by Stock and Siegfried: managing the dissertation committee. In the monograph model, one hears way too often, “just add these important additional runs of the model”, “what happens with this functional form?”, “you left out these pieces (from my grad school days) from the lit review”,”you need to go back and look at…”. The accepted level of extraneous bullshit that can be added to any 30-page essay is much smaller, thus easier to discipline the committee.

Comment on Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation by Bill M Cooke (@BillCookeIII)

Bill M Cooke (@BillCookeIII) — Wed, 22 May 2013 18:25:19 +0000

I agree with Isaac

Comment on Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation by Jason

Jason — Wed, 22 May 2013 12:26:01 +0000

Hmm I kind of agree that if article publication is the main goal, they should be written that way from the start. I can see the other side too though.

Comment on Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation by Isaac

Isaac — Wed, 22 May 2013 06:10:42 +0000

The advantage of writing a monograph is that you can afford to be more daring; do something unpopular, which, regardless of how brilliant, would be hard to publish in AER & Co. Also, you can afford to be *less* efficient and explore the topic from different perspectives, which, of course, you are cannot do given the constraints of the article form.

Comment on Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation by David Croson (@ProfDC)

David Croson (@ProfDC) — Tue, 21 May 2013 22:14:03 +0000

The version of the Summers PhD creation myth that *I* heard differed in that he found three *unpublished* articles and turned them in. (Holding the PhD was necessary to receive tenure at MIT.)

Comment on Keynes in the Spotlight by Niclas Berggren

Niclas Berggren — Sat, 18 May 2013 06:45:12 +0000

Here is a more positive analysis of Keynes and his “immoralism”, finding him not to be too distant from Hayek’s views.

Berggren, Niclas (2009). “Choosing One’s Own Informal Institutions: On Hayek’s Critique of Keynes’s Immoralism.” Constitutional Political Economy, 20(2): 139-159. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10602-008-9055-3

Comment on Keynes in the Spotlight by David Hoopes

David Hoopes — Fri, 17 May 2013 22:54:01 +0000

Wow. I had no idea.

Comment on Arrunada Seminar: Benito Arruñada – Underprovision of Public Registries? by policyanalysis

policyanalysis — Fri, 17 May 2013 18:15:39 +0000

Arguably, the subprime crisis would not have happened with a functioning registration system in the US, in which either the registry itself or a notary authenticating a mortgage is bound by law to examine the legality of the contract and the absence of contradictory rights before it is registered (Robert Shiller, 2008). Most certainly, however, the lack of such a system in the US severely slows the solution of the crisis most adequate in terms of both contract theory and macroeconomics (H. Schmiegelow and M. Schmiegelow, 2009). Remarkably, leading economists of both neo-classical and Keynesian persuasion (Feldstein, 2011; Krugman, 2011) did plead strongly for mortgage modification as a crucial method of solving the subprime crisis. The Obama administration attempted various programs of mortgage modification, unsuccessfully on the legislative level and with mixed results on the level of the executive agencies. The Congress remained deeply divided ideologically on many points, among others on the issue of whether “predatory lenders” or “predatory borrowers” had caused the crisis. In the end the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (US Congress, 2010) was adopted. This is considered to be the most ambitious regulatory reform since the Great Depression with the aim of preventing recurrence of similar crises in the future. But replacing the costly, time consuming and nonetheless legally uncertain American recording system was regrettably not part of the reform.

TARP Inspector Neil Barofsky understandably called for supervised screening of each mortgage slice packaged in each mortage-backed security to prevent conflicts of interest or fraud. Given the structural impediment of the American recording system, this promises to slow the solution, and magnify the cost, of the crisis to an incalculable extent. Of course, law suits between mortgage lenders and borrowers as well as sellers, buyers and insurers of mortgage-backed securities have begun in the US and may take many years at considerable legal cost, the longer they last, the higher the cost. Meanwhile banks are reluctant to channel the Federal Reserve’s generous liquidity provision through quantitative easing into new lending.

Benito Arrunada’s arguments are highly relevant in terms of both institutional economics and legal origins theory. On the level of institutional economics it would be interesting to analyze the impact of the presence of functioning recording systems on intermediate factors of growth, such as lending volume in various samples of countries in long times series since the establishment of the system in each country. For legal origins theory (La Porta et al., 2008), Arrunada’s work presents a significant challenge, as the presence or absence of functioning recording systems cuts across the common law/civil law divide. One leading country each of the common law and the civil law tradition, the US and France, share the inefficient recording system.

Michèle Schmiegelow, Université Catholique de Louvain

Comment on Jackson Nickerson at SMG by Peter Klein

Peter Klein — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:05:37 +0000

Interestingly, two-thirds of the aforementioned coterie reside in Missouri — clearly the center of the TCE world!