Over at The Conglomerate, Gordon Smith asks:

Law professors teach and write about topics like public choice, agency capture, rent seeking, etc., but I don’t often hear law professors talking systematically about the use of law for strategic purposes. . . . In simplest terms, the study of law and strategy views the world from the perspective of a business and asks: how can we use law to gain a competitive advantage? This question ought to be of interest to lawyers, but does any law school teach a class on law and strategy?

The context is Richard Shell’s book Make the Rules or Your Rivals Will, which sounds interesting and important. Perhaps the O&M readership can help? The emerging field of non-market strategy (1, 2), led by people like David Baron, Vit Henisz, and the de Figueiredo brothers, studies how firms use not only law but also the regulatory system, bureaucracies, and other non-market features to achieve competitive advantage. The older economics literatures on public choice and rent-seeking of course deal with these issues as well, but typically from “society’s” point of view, rather than the firm’s. As for teaching, I see from a little Googling that John de Figueiredo is teaching law and strategy at Duke, and I suspect other members of the non-market strategy crowd housed at law schools do so as well. Suggestions for Gordon?

Along with Don Siegel, Nick Wilson, and Mike Wright, I am guest editing a special issue of Managerial and Decision Economics on the “Effects of Alternative Investments on Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Growth.” Proposals are due 15 June 2011. A special issue conference for developing the papers is planned for 29 October 2011 at the SUNY Global Center in Manhattan. The conference is jointly sponsored by the SUNY-Albany School of Business, the Centre for Private Equity Research at Imperial College Business School, and the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Further details and submission guidelines are below the fold.

Call for Papers: 
Special Issue of Managerial and Decision Economics

EFFECTS OF ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS
ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP, INNOVATION, AND GROWTH

Submission Due Date: June 15, 2012
Special Issue Conference: October 29, 2012

Guest Editors:
Peter Klein, University of Missouri
Donald Siegel, University at Albany, SUNY
Nick Wilson, Leeds University Business School
Mike Wright, Imperial College Business School

Special Issue Conference sponsored by
School of Business, University at Albany, SUNY
Centre for Private Equity Research, Imperial College Business School
McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, University of Missouri

Introduction

The past decade has brought rapid growth in a variety of specialist alternative investment vehicles, including venture capital, business angel funds, later-stage private equity, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure funds, and real estate funds. The importance of venture capital and angel investment for new firms, particularly in high-growth, high-technology sectors, is well known. But alternative investments span a wide range of company types, from small, early-stage ventures with high growth rates but little cash flow to large firms in mature industries that generate substantial cash flow.

Alternative investment vehicles introduce new forms of financing with different objectives and diverse forms of involvement by investors in portfolio firms. Alternative investors differ widely in skills, goals, experience, and investment time horizons. They often invest across a variety of institutional environments, transferring standard investment approaches from one sector or country to another. Because these alternative equity stakes are generally less liquid than shares in publicly traded enterprises, their growth raises a host of important issues for the organization and governance of portfolio companies, for the structure of industries heavily dependent on alternative investment pools, and for entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth more generally.

This special issue of Managerial and Decision Economics focuses on the effects of alternative investments on entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth. These issues are especially timely given current debates about the role of alternative investments in stimulating economic outcomes and the need for diverse sources of capital to stimulate economic growth in conditions of severe recession. We welcome theoretical papers, large scale quantitative analyses, and focused case studies.

Research Questions

Research questions that contributors to the special issue might address include:

• How does the nature of deals vary by different types of alternative investor? What factors are influential in determining these differences?
• What are the relationships between financial structuring of deals and the nature and extent of entrepreneurship and innovation in portfolio firms?
• How does financial structure affect entrepreneurial alertness, judgment, and innovation not only in new firms, but in established organizations as well?
• To what extent do alternative investors engage in funding both restructuring and innovative activities? What are the effects of alternative investments on growth at the level of the firm, sector, region, and economy?
• How do buyout firms attempt to increase innovation within public companies that are taken private?
• How have the roles of alternative investment vehicles changed over time, as in the changing roles of venture capital firms and business angels in Silicon Valley?
• How do venture capital and angel investors organize themselves into networks? How do these affect venture performance?
• What is the nature of the contractual relationships between alternative investors and founders or operators of startup companies?
• What explains the clustering of alternative investments across industries? Across time and place?
• To what extent can alternative investors, as “active” participants in their portfolio companies, themselves be modeled as entrepreneurs?

Papers on related issues not explicitly listed above are also welcome.

Submission and Review Process

Submissions must be made on or before June 15, 2012. All papers will be externally reviewed according to standard policies of Managerial and Decision Economics.

Conference Details and Time Line

To aid in the development of papers, a special issue conference will be held at the SUNY Global Center in Midtown Manhattan October 29, 2012.

Accommodation and meals will be provided for all authors and discussants attending the conference. Financial support is provided by the School of Business and the Center for Institutional Investment Management at the University at Albany, SUNY, the Centre for Private Equity Research at Nottingham University Business School, and the McQuinn Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri.

Key dates:
June 15, 2012: Deadline for electronic submission of papers to the conference and special issues
August 15, 2012: Notification to authors regarding acceptance for conference
October 29, 2012 : Special Issue Conference at the SUNY Global Center

More Information

For additional information, please contact see http://mcquinn.missouri.edu/cfp2012June15.htm or contact the special issue editors:
Peter Klein, University of Missouri, pklein@missouri.edu
Donald Siegel, University at Albany, SUNY, dsiegel@uamail.albany.edu
Mike Wright, Imperial College, London, mike.wright@imperial.ac.uk
Nick Wilson, Leeds University Business School, nw@lubs.leeds.ac.uk

If you’re in New York on February 6, you might want to go hear the always-interesting Henry Hansmann talk about work he is doing with Nicolai’s CBS colleague Steen Thomsen. The talk is at 4:20 in Room 701 Jerome Greene Hall at Columbia. This is part of the Columbia Law and Economics Workshop. (I’m on their mailing list but seldom have the time to make the trip.) Here’s the abstract:

Industrial foundations are nonprofit holding companies that own business firms. These entities are common in Northern Europe, and many successful international companies are owned in thus fashion. Because of their strong economic performance and unusual combination of nonprofit and for-profit entities, they present interesting challenges to theories of the firm. In this paper, we present the first study of the manner in which the foundations govern the companies that they own. We work with a rich data set comprising 121 foundation-owned Danish companies over the period 2003-2008.

We focus in particular on a composite structural factor that we term “managerial distance.” We interpret this as a measure of the clarity and objectivity with which a foundation-owned company’s top managers are induced to focus on the company’s profitability. More particularly, managerial distance seems best interpreted as a factor, or aggregate of component factors, that put the foundation board in the position of “virtual owners,” in the sense that the information and decisions facing the managers are framed for them in roughly the way they would be framed for profit-seeking outside owners of the company. Our empirical analysis shows a positive, significant, and robust association between managerial distance and company economic performance. The findings appear to illuminate not just foundation governance, but corporate governance and fiduciary behavior more generally.

Over the last few years, CBS has bestowed honorary doctoral degrees on the likes of Jay Barney, Oliver Williamson, Oliver Hart, Michael Brennan, and other luminaries in strategy, the theory of the firm, and finance (in addition to a number of reps of pomo in management research that are of small interest to O&M readers). At a ceremony on 19 April a CBS honorary doctorate will be bestowed upon Birger Wernerfelt.

Wernerfelt is the JC Penney Professor of Management of the MIT Sloan School of Management. A Danish citizen, Wernerfelt holds degrees from the University of Copenhagen and Harvard. Wernerfelt’s best known work is no doubt “A Resource-based View of the Firm.” With more than 12,000 cites (google scholar) this paper is also one of the most cited social science research articles ever, and, of course, one of the founding papers of strategy’s (still) dominant view, the resource-based approach. The paper develops a conception of firms as bundles of heterogeneous and partly firm-specific resources, and links this conception to sustainable performance differences between firms as well as to growth strategies through resource-based diversification. These ideas opened up several paths of research in strategic management in the following decades, including Wernerfelt’s own influential empirical work (with Cynthia Montgomery) on diversification and its link to performance (e.g., here).

More recently, Wernerfelt has been working on other truly fundamental aspects of the theory of the firm, namely the reason why firms exist and what explains their boundaries and internal organization. Thus, in a series of papers, Wernerfelt has developed an argument that the employment relationship exists because it allows the parties to the contract to exploit economies of scale in bargaining costs (e.g., here) — a stream that may be seen as  much more true to the original message in Coase’s (1937) “The Nature of the Firm” than the asset-specificity branch of the theory of the firm. Wernerfelt has extended the argument to the understanding of asset ownership, communication within and between firms, and the strength of incentives in firms versus markets. In addition to these contributions to strategic management and the theory of the firm, Wernerfelt has contributed to the economics of search and numerous important contribution to marketing theory.

Raghu Rajan’s AFA presidential address is now online as an NBER working paper:

The nature of the firm and its financing are closely interlinked. To produce significant net present value, an entrepreneur has to transform her enterprise into one that is differentiated from the ordinary. To achieve the control that will allow her to execute this strategy, she needs to have substantial ownership, and thus financing. But it is hard to raise finance against differentiated assets. So an entrepreneur has to commit to undertake a second transformation, standardization, that will make the human capital in the firm, including her own, replaceable, so that outside financiers obtain rights over going-concern surplus. I argue that the availability of a vibrant stock market helps the entrepreneur commit to these two transformations in a way that a debt market would not. This helps explain why the nature of firms and the extent of innovation differ so much in different financing environments.

You’ve all heard the story of the Manhattan socialite who expressed shock at Nixon’s landslide 1972 victory because “nobody I know voted for him.” (Attributed variously to Pauline Kael, Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and others, and probably apocryphal, but who cares; it’s a great quote.) I was reminded of this by a line in Larry Summers’s confidential 2008 economic policy memo now making the rounds, courtesy of the New Yorker: “Greg Mankiw is the only economist we have consulted with [about the optimal stimulus package] who refused to name a number and was generally skeptical about stimulus.” How can a huge stimulus package be wrong — everybody I know favors it!

(For the record, the economists consulted — supposedly representing the full spectrum of legitimate opinion — were Robert Reich (recommended stimulus: $1.2 trillion over 2 years), Joe Siglitz ($1 trillion over two years), Paul Krugman ($600 billion in one year), Jamie Galbraith ($900 billion in one year), Dean Baker and colleagues ($900 billion), Marty Feldstein ($400 billion in one year), Larry Lindsey ($800 billion to $1 trillion), Ken Rogoff ($1 trillion over two years), Mark Zandi ($600 billion in one year), an unnamed group of Fed officials (over $600 billion), Adam Posen ($500-700 billion in one year), and an unnamed group at Goldman Sachs(!) ($600 billion). So, we’ve got left-wing Keynesians, right-wing Keynesians, moderate Keynesians, Robert Reich who wouldn’t know a Keynesian from a Kenyan, and Goldman Sachs. How’s that for diversity of opinion?)

Update: Mankiw agrees: “Of course, the fact that I was ‘the only economist’ expressing skepticism reflects the range of economists that Team Obama chose to consult.”

The January 2012 issue of the AMR (available here for subscribers or those with academic access) features two review articles assessing the progress of the “Promise” examined in the well-known article by Scott Shane and Sankaran Venkataraman (AMR 2000: The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research) — one from each of the original co-authors. The first is an interesting, if somewhat pedestrian, article by Scott Shane. The second is a much more profound and ambitious contribution by Venkataraman together with Saras Sarasvathy, Nicholas Dew, and William Forster.

In the decade since that article there has, indeed, been a significant shift in the focus of research in entrepreneurship. Most notable, perhaps, is the focus on entrepreneurial “opportunities” — familiar to Austrian economists from the work of Israel Kirzner, but by now a standard element in the story. Each of the articles spends considerable time revisiting questions about the nature of entrepreneurial opportunities and provides its own resolutions. Here I will provide just a quick overview of this part of Shane’s article. (I intend to provide one for the second article soon).

In considering the “nexus of opportunities and individuals” offered originally in “Promise” as a reason to shift attention from the person to the function, Shane addresses the question of whether entrepreneurial opportunities should be considered “objective” or “subjective” — a question that has proliferated in this research stream, albeit with varying focus and terminology. The problem is, it seems to me, that the notion of “opportunity” is one that depends on the formation of a mental image by some individual or individuals. Opportunity implies plan — a plan of action to use, transform, combine, existing resources in a profitable way. Without the plan there is just the world. So how can “opportunity” be objective? This is related to the question: are opportunities “discovered” (Alvarez and Barney: Organizaҫões em Contexto, 2007) or are they created; or in the words of Venkataraman, et. al. are they made or found?

Shane thinks now that the whole debate was probably unnecessary and that opportunities must be objective. If not, then there is no way to talk about unsuccessful entrepreneurial action. If, as asserted by our esteemed host Professor Peter Klein (Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2008), opportunities are “imagined” and “are inherently subjective — they do not exist until profits are realized” (180) — “then unsuccessful entrepreneurship is a logical impossibility. No entrepreneur can fail to generate an entrepreneurial profit” (Shane, 16). No profit, no opportunity really existed.

Shane resolves this by making a distinction between entrepreneurial opportunities and business ideas. The latter are subjective. Juxtaposing the two rescues the notion of failed entrepreneurship.

This strikes me as unacceptably ad hoc, to say the least. I think Shane does not really understand what “subjectivism” is all about and, as a result, his treatment is rather superficial. Nevertheless, he may be incidentally right in suggesting that aspects of the debate are unnecessary. I refer to the ontological status of “opportunity.”  Subjectivism in economics and related fields is an epistemological issue, not an ontological one. Accordingly, I would say as follows: Opportunities originate as perceptions — perceptions of what can be done to earn a profit. (Klein says “imagined” which I think is essentially the same as perceived.) Perceptions are both real and subjective. These perceptions may turn out to be right or wrong. The “discovery” of an opportunity is, strictly speaking, the formation of a perception, a plan involving real (objective) resources. So, action in pursuit of a perceived (discovered, created) opportunity is entrepreneurial action and may be successful or unsuccessful.

Alvarez and Barney — Academy of Management Annals, 2010 — blurring epistemology and ontology, want to make a distinction between exogenously and endogenously generated opportunities. I am not sure this is a viable or profitable distinction. To repeat, all opportunities are about perceptions that can be right or wrong.

TBC: Part 2.

Did you know 2012 is the centenary of Charles Dickens’s birth? Dickens is often lumped with Carlyle, Shaw, Ruskin, etc. as a Romantic, Victorian, literary anti-capitalist. (Carlyle indeed disliked capitalism, but not for the usual reasons.) But Dickens, as I originally learned from Paul Cantor, was a wildly successful capitalist and entrepreneur, a driving force behind the great nineteenth-century innovation of the serialized, commercial novel. Consider the following from one Dickens scholar:

Stephen Marcus has called Dickens “the first capitalist of literature” in the sense that he worked within apparently adverse conditions to take advantage of new technologies and markets, creating, in effect, an entirely new role for fiction. In Charles Dickens and His Publishers, Robert Patten quotes Oscar Dystel (president and chief executive of Bantam Paperbacks) on the three “key factors” in his development of a successful paperback line: availability of new material, introduction of the rubber plate rotary press, and development of magazine wholesalers as a distribution arm. As Patten points out, parallel factors operated in the Victorian era: a plethora of writers, new technologies, and expanded distribution. And as methods of papermaking, printing, and platemaking increased in efficiency, so did means of transportation. By 1836, a crucial network of wholesale book outlets in the Strand, peddlers, provincial shops, and the royal mailmade possible by the development of paved roads, fast coaches, and eventually the national railway systemhad been consolidated. The final task facing early publishers was, then, to develop the newly accessible market for their commodity. By lowering prices, emphasizing illustrations and sensational elements, and increasing variety of both form and content, publishers created readers within the largest demographic groups: the rising middle and working classes, where readers had essentially not existed before. . . .

Concurrently with these marketing advances, Dickens transformed the narrative from a standard series of bumbling sportsmen’s sketches into a picaresque based in London but depicting urban infiltration of the country. The fifth number introduced a working-class character, Sam Weller, and his father. Audiences responded well to Dickens’s humorous but sympathetic textual representation of these urban characters. Sales soared after Sam appeared on the scene, and readers apparently wrote Dickens to ”counsel him to develop the character largelyto the utmost.” And Dickens, already showing the true responsiveness to his audience that contrasts so markedly with the simulated responsiveness of Chapman and Hall, answered by making Sam central to the Pickwick adventures.

The author’s and publishers’ narrative, advertising, and distribution techniques, innovative from an entrepreneurial standpoint, proved overwhelmingly successful. By number 5, Pickwick’s circulation had increased to forty thousand per number, where it stayed throughout the run. As Norman N. Feltes is careful to stress in his Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, this success is generally attributed to literary genius, lucky accident, and marketing ability, combining to explode upon the literary world. But, Feltes argues, the historical processes that shaped and determined the material production of Pickwick Papers are as important as “genius, luck, and the shrewdness of Chapman and Hall.” The series’ success certainly depended on a combination of perfect timing, insight into the potential of advertising, Dickens’s great comic skill and ability to reflect his audience, and fine-tuning of the narrative to respond to audience desire. But all these factors could not have arisen simultaneously without the particular nexus of economic, technological, and ideological conditions existent in the 1830s.

The source is Jennifer Hayward’s Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera.

I recently read Planet of the Apes, the 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle that inspired the movie franchise. Not surprisingly, the book is far more interesting and intelligent than the films. In the novel (spoiler alert!), the ape planet isn’t a future Earth, but a distant world much like Earth in which apes gradually assimilated and displaced a former human civilization simply by imitating their masters. The discovery of this older civilization (confirmed by the remains a talking human doll, as in the 1968 movie) explains the mystery of why ape culture stagnated at the level of its former human model. The apes could imitate, but not innovate.

The human protagonist convinces himself that imitation could produce a reasonable quality of science and art, then turns to more mundane activities.

It seemed absolutely clear that industry did not require the presence of a rational being to maintain itself. Basically, industry consisted of manual laborers, always performing the selfsame tasks, who could easily be replaced by apes; and, at a higher level, of executives whose function was to draft certain reports and pronounce ceratin words under given circumstances. All this was a question of conditioned reflexes. At the still higher level of administration, it seemed even easier to concede the quality of aping. To continue our system, the gorillas would merely have to imitate certain attitudes and deliver a few harangues, all based on the same model.

Not a flattering portrait of management, but keep in mind that the protagonist (like the book’s author) is French.

Via Scott Masten, an important call for papers:

The Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is issuing a call for original research papers to be presented at the Conference on the Law & Economics of Organization: New Challenges and Directions.  The conference will be held at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, CA, on Friday, Nov. 30, and Saturday, Dec. 1, 2012. The purpose of the conference is to take stock of recent advances in the analysis of economic organization and institutions inspired by the work of 2009 Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson and to examine its implications for contemporary problems of organization and regulation. Empirical research and research informed by detailed industry and institutional knowledge is especially welcome.  Conference papers will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization. Submissions are due March 31, 2012.  See the Call for Papers for details.