Archive for March, 2015
Video from Coase Conference
| Peter Klein |
Last weekend the Ronald Coase Institute held a conference, “The Next Generation of Discovery: Research and Policy Change Inspired by Ronald Coase.” The impressive lineup featured Kenneth Arrow, Oliver Williamson, Gary Libecap, Sam Peltzman, John Nye, Claude Menard, Ning Wang, Lee and Alexandra Benham, Mary Shirley, and many others. The Institute has now made both days of the program available on video. Great stuff.
Photo courtesy of John Nye.
O&M in South America
| Peter Klein |
I hope to see O&M readers and friends at next week’s SMS Special Conference in Santiago, “From Local Voids to Local Goods: Can Institutions Promote Competitive Advantage?” The conference focuses on the relationships among institutions, firm strategy, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. Besides the usual paper and paper-development sessions, Tarun Khanna’s keynote and several plenary sessions should be of special interest to O&Mers.
Before heading to Santiago I will be giving talks in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo sponsored by Mises Brasil, to celebrate a new Portuguese translation of my 2010 book The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur, as well as visiting my friends and colleagues at Insper, which among other activities is starting a doctoral program in business administration.
O&M is popular in Latin America. Nicolai and I are both on the advisory board of CORS and have given the CORS lecture; Nicolai was at USP last month to give a PhD course in strategy and organization.
A Good Reason to Study Corporate Culture
| Peter Klein |
Corporate culture is hard to define and measure (Kreps’s game-theoretic version is probably the one most familiar to economists), but may play a role in explaining variation in firm performance. Of course, one should not invoke “culture” as an explanation for outcomes without specifying some microfoundations. And culture may be as much the result of firm performance as the cause.
But organizations can also serve as a sort of laboratory for understanding the links between informal institutions like culture and more formal institutions such as written rules, policies, and procedures in society at large, a very important issue for economic history, growth, public policy, etc. So say Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza, and Luigi Zingales in this short note:
Unlike large societies, however, corporations give hopes to identify the link between culture and formal institutions. . . . First, the creation of a firm is a moment where the founder has the power to set values on a blank slate. Identification of this moment is easier (it is recorded, it is recent) than identifying when and who sets the values of a large community (e.g. a country). Second, culture is easier to change in a corporation. Through hiring and firing corporations can select values by selecting people, avoiding the more difficult strategy of changing their minds. And can punish them if they do not adapt (e.g. by deferring promotion). In large societies only the difficult strategy is available, and slow adaptation is hard to punish, unless slow-adapters are outlawed, which makes culture and law undistinguishable. Third, it is easier to establish the link with performance. Performance is continuously recorded, for the corporation as a whole and often for its segments and divisions in order to implement compensation schemes. Hence, one can study the role of shared norms and beliefs while controlling for the power of economic incentives. Finally, because firms break up and merge much more often than countries, an observer can collect exposure of a firm to a new culture much more often than one can for larger societies.
Here is the link (NBER gated, CEPR, may be ungated for some users).
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments