Author Archive
More AoM PDWs
| Peter Klein |
There are too many good AoM sessions to mention them all — there’s even a Tweet Up for social-media freaks (hey, where’s the Insta-Slam?) — but I’ll mention two more Professional Development Workshops of interest:
Myths and Realities of Capitalism: Micro and Macro Perspectives
Session #609, Sunday, Aug 11 2013 4:30PM – 7:30PM at WDW Dolphin Resort in Asia 3Organizer: Rajshree Agarwal, U. of Maryland
Speaker: John Allison, Cato Institute
Speaker: Yaron Brook, Ayn Rand Institute
Speaker: Paul Green, Morning Star
Speaker: Jay B Barney, Eccles School, U. of Utah
Speaker: Doug Kirkpatrick, Morning Star Institute
Speaker: Peter G Klein, U. of Missouri
Speaker: Edwin A. Locke, U. of Maryland, College Park
Speaker: John Sullivan, Center for International Private Enterprise
Organizer: Hildy Teegen, U. of South Carolina
Speaker: Paul E. Tesluk, U. of BuffaloThe theme of the 2013 Academy of Management Meetings is based on a call into question of the efficacy and merits of capitalism—and the free enterprise system that it entails. However, all of the economic systems in the world today represent varying degrees of free enterprise and government intervention. This PDW addresses the call of examining micro and macro perspectives on some of the myths and realities of capitalism. A critical and informed examination of perhaps the most foundational underpinning of business and management —voluntary trade among producers based on the premise of human rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness—is urgently called for. The PDW brings together micro and macro scholars within the Academy, along with leading businessmen and spokespersons from policy institutes. The format of the PDW allows for an articulation of premises that guide both micro individual behavior and macro institutional factors that are required for value creation under a capitalist system, and a discussion of the alleged virtues and vices of capitalism. The workshop is designed in four parts and is structured to provide workshop participants with the opportunity to learn from experts and each other and to co-develop relevant implications for management faculty around the world.
Entrepreneurial Opportunity—The State of the Debate and The Linkages to Management
Session #258, Saturday, Aug 10 2013 10:00AM – 12:00PM at WDW Swan Resort in Mockingbird 1Chair: Robert Joseph Wuebker, U. of Utah
Discussant: Roy R Suddaby, U. of Alberta
Presenter: Jay B Barney, Eccles School, U. of Utah
Participant: David Audretsch, Indiana U., Bloomington
Presenter: Dimo Dimov, U. of Bath
Presenter: Sharon Alvarez, The Ohio State U.
Presenter: Peter G Klein, U. of Missouri
Presenter: Mike Wright, Imperial College London
Presenter: P. Devereaux Jennings, U. of AlbertaFor more than two decades, the field of entrepreneurship has struggled to converge on a definition of a core distinction in the field—entrepreneurial opportunity. The recent publication of a series of reflection papers in the Academy of Management—along with the published reactions, comments on the reactions, and meta-commentary—highlight both the importance of this dialogue to the field and illuminate the competing and mutually exclusive perspectives on (1) the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity and (2) the importance of the debate itself. This workshop offers a structured discussion about the status of entrepreneurial opportunity with the individuals who are at the “sharp end” of the debate, and framed by the journal editors that are directly involved in promoting, framing, and shaping it. We accomplish this through a panel format in which we curate representative positions on the question of entrepreneurial opportunity. Each panelist will reflect on the historical and theoretical roots of their position; note key assumptions and important priors; and elucidate the consequences of each position on the research and teaching program for the field. Following our panel, editors from Academy of Management Journal and Organization Science will offer their perspective and lead a Q&A session between panelists and participants.
Climate Science and the Scientific Method
| Peter Klein |
This article on climate science skeptics is making the rounds, and drawing the expected denouncements in the usual quarters. It actually makes some reasonable, and quite mild, statements, namely that climate science, like astronomy or evolutionary biology, is a different kind of “science” than physics or chemistry or geology or other mundane sciences. In the former fields, the fundamental assumptions and key mechanisms are usually not falsifiable, the data are often fuzzier than usual, and there is frequently a lot of hand-waiving to fill in gaps.
Many climate sceptics worry climate science cannot be dubbed scientific as it is not falsifiable (as in Popper’s demarcation criterion). They claim that while elements of climate science may be testable in the lab, the complexity of interactions and feedback loops, as well as the levels of uncertainty in climate models, are too high to be a useful basis for public policy. The relationship of observations to these models are also a worry for climate sceptics. In particular, the role of climate sensitivity.
As well as their use of models, the quality of observations themselves have been open to criticism; some of which have been attempts to clean up issues deriving from the messiness of data collection in the real world (eg the positioning of weather stations), while others have focused on perceived weaknesses in the proxy methods required to calculate historic temperature data such as cross-sections of polar ice sheets and fossilised tree rings.
Such claims are of variable quality, but what unites them is a conviction that data quality in various branches of climate science are below those required by “real science”.
What strikes me the most about these “big” sciences is the language and tone typically used to communicate the results to the public. Where scientists in mundane fields express their conclusions cautiously, emphasizing that results and conclusions are tentative and always subject to challenge and revision, climate scientists seem to view themselves as Brave Crusaders for Truth, striking down “Deniers” (who must be funded by the oil industry or some other evil group). They shout that we “know” this or that about climate change, what the planet will be like in 5,000 years, etc. You hardly ever hear other scientists talk like this, or act as if skeptics are necessarily prejudiced and irrational.
“Trapped” in Rental Contracts
| Peter Klein |
In today’s feature on the US housing market, an NPR correspondent sadly notes that foreclosure victims are “trapped” in rentals. Why, those poor, unlevered souls, choosing to purchase a flow of housing services over time, rather than buying a huge, illiquid housing asset outright, using borrowed funds. Tragic!
It made me think of similar tragedies:
- Mercedes and BMW drivers trapped in lease contracts, rather than buying their cars with cash or credit
- Individuals trapped in wage and salary contracts, rather than raising the capital, arranging the inputs, and bearing the uncertainties to be sole proprietors
- Companies trapped in outsourcing agreements, rather than owning all upstream and downstream production processes directly, as vertically integrated firms
- Vacationers trapped in resort hotels, rather than owning their own vacation condos or timeshares
- Readers trapped by downloading and reading books on their Kindles, essentially “renting” them from Amazon, rather than buying physical books
- Movie fans trapped in DVD rental agreements with Netflix, rather than owning massive DVD libraries
Don’t these suckers know that goods and services should always be purchased outright, rather than rented or borrowed?
More Orson
| Peter Klein |
A useful management tip from the great director:
Orson Welles: Did I ever tell you the story of [Franz Joseph’s] visit to the provinces? It’s a great movie story. You can use it on set almost any day with an assistant director.
Henry Jaglom: What is it?
OW: Franz Joseph is riding in his carriage through this tiny provincial town, plumes and all. The trembling mayor is sitting next to him. He says, “Your Imperial Highness, I have to apologize to you in the profoundest terms for the fact that the bells are not ringing in the steeple. There are three reasons. First, there are no bells in the steeple — ” And Franz Joesph interrupts him and says, “Please don’t’ tell me the other two reasons.” Now, that’s a good answer for every assistant director, everyone in the world that you’ve had working for you in any capacity.
HJ: Where you just want to get a straight answer. . . .
OW: I tell that story when I make a movie, always. When somebody starts with the excuses, I say, “Bells in the steeple.” It stops them every time.
Student: “I didn’t finish the assignment because, well, um. . . .” Professor: “Bells in the steeple!” I’m putting that one on my syllabus.
Two AoM PDWs of Interest
| Peter Klein |
O&Mers attending the AoM conference may find these Professional Development Workshops, sponsored by the Academy of Management Perspectives and based on recent AMP symposia, of particular interest:
The first PDW is on “Private Equity” and features presentations on the managerial, strategic, and public policy implications of private equity transactions. Presenters include Robert Hoskisson (Rice University), Nick Bacon (City University London), Mike Wright (Imperial College London), and Peter Klein (University of Missouri). The private equity session takes place Saturday, Aug 10, 2013 from 11:30AM – 12:30PM at WDW Dolphin Resort in Oceanic 5.
The second is on “Microfoundations of Management,” and features presentations from Nicolai Foss (Copenhagen Business School), Henrich Greve (INSEAD), Sidney Winter (Wharton), Jay Barney (Utah), Teppo Felin (Oxford), Andrew Van de Ven (Minnesota), and Arik Lifschitz (Minnesota). The microfoundations session takes place Monday, Aug 12, 2013 from 9:00AM
– 10:30AM at WDW Dolphin Resort in Oceanic 5
Preregistration isn’t required but please let Don Siegel or Tim Devinney know if you plan to attend, as space is limited.
Orson Welles on Organizational Structure
| Peter Klein |
Welles was perhaps the greatest auteur of cinema and modern theater, so it’s no surprise that he comes out in favor of flatter hierarchies:
OW: [Irving] Thalberg was the biggest single villain in the history of Hollywood. Before him, an producer made the least contribution, by necessity. The producer didn’t direct, he didn’t act, he didn’t write — so, therefore, all he could do was either (A) mess it up, which he didn’t do very often, or (B) tenderly caress it. Support it. Producers would only go to the set to see that you were on budget, and that you didn’t burn down the scenery. But [Louis B.] Mayer made way for the producer system. He created the fellow who decides, who makes the directors’ decisions, which had never existed before.
HJ: Didn’t the other studio heads interfere with their directors?
OW: None of the old hustlers did that much harm. If they saw somebody good, they hired him. They tried to screw it up afterwards, but there was still a kind of dialogue between talent and the fellow up there in the front office. They had that old Russian-Jewish respect for the artist. All they did was say what they liked, and what they didn’t like, and argue with you. That’s easy to deal with. And sometimes the talent won. But once you got the educated producers, he has a desk, he’s gotta have a function, he’s gotta do something. He’s not running the studio and counting the money — he’s gotta be creative. That was Thalberg. The director became the fellow whose only job was to day, “Action” and “Cut.” Suddenly, you were “just a director” on a “Thalberg production.” Don’t you see? A role had been created in the world. Just as there used to be no conductor of symphonies.
HJ: There was no conductor?
OW: No. The konzertmeister, first violinist, gave the beat. The conductor’s job was invented. Like the theater director, a role that is only 150, 200 years old. Nobody directed plays before then. The stage manager said, “Walk left on that line.” The German, what’s his name, Saxe-Meiningen, invented directing in the theater. And Thalberg invented producing in movies. He persuaded all the writers that they couldn’t write without him, because he as he great man.
Clearly Orson would not agree with my take on entrepreneurship and ultimate responsibility, as applied to the arts. Or do well in a restaurant kitchen. I have to admit, though, that Welles has a certain credibility on the subject of creativity.
Oversight
| Peter Klein |
When I testified last year before Congress on the Federal Reserve System I focused not on monetary theory and policy, but on organization theory, pointing out that an independent, largely unaccountable organization lacking any systematic oversight or governance procedures cannot possibly perform well. O&M readers have heard these complaints before. Not surprisingly, the same issues are key to understanding the debate over the NSA’s domestic surveillance procedures. The NSA’s defenders say its actions are lawful and appropriate and that there is effective oversight and governance, because Congress is briefed on the programs and an independent (albeit secret) court approves specific policies and data requests. “The government does not know,” wrote Richard Epstein and Roger Pilon, “whether you’ve called your psychiatrist, lawyer or lover. The names linked to the phone numbers are not available to the government before a court grants a warrant on proof of probable cause, just as the Fourth Amendment requires.”
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations, we know the first part of this claim is nonsense: a low-level contractor can request names and the content of actual calls with a few mouse clicks. (Even the collection of metadata is itself a gross violation of privacy.) More disturbing, the NSA now admits it has “three-hop” authority, meaning that it can access the calls not only of alleged terrorists, but those in contact with alleged terrorists, and those in contact with those in contact with alleged terrorists. (Watch out, Kevin Bacon!) More interesting is the claim about alleged judicial oversight. We’ve long known that the secret FISA court, which approves surveillance requests, gives the spy agencies what they want 99% of the time. To call the FISA court procedure a rubber stamp is an insult to rubber stamps. And what of the alleged Congressional participation and oversight? We heard this yesterday:
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren revealed that an annual report provided to Congress by the government about the phone-records collection, something cited by intelligence officials as an example of their disclosures to Congress, is “less than a single page and not more than eight sentences.”
So much for transparency and detailed disclosure. (By comparison, my last annual report to my supervisor, reporting on such issues vital to national security as my academic publications, conference participation, teaching activities, etc., was 14 pages and 2,700 words.)
The bottom line is that, whatever one thinks is the appropriate scope for these surveillance programs, the US intelligence agencies operate without any de facto oversight and governance. Small groups of unelected officials and bureaucrats decide, at their sole discretion, what is and isn’t appropriate for “protecting national security.” You don’t need a course in organization theory to predict how such groups will behave.
Organizational Learning without Markets
| Peter Klein |
A really interesting NBER paper from Thomas Triebs and Justin Tumlinson confirms what you may suspect, that firms operating outside the market system — in this case, in the former East Germany — do not learn the capabilities for judging market signals. Triebs and Tumlinson compare East and West German firms after unification and find that East German firms did not anticipate, or respond to, market information as well as their West German counterparts, other things equal, suggesting that during the Communist period, firms lost (or failed to acquire) the ability to work within a market setting. The paper is based on a formal learning model but the empirical results seem to square with a variety of approaches, including resource-based and managerial capabilities theories.
Learning Capitalism the Hard Way—Evidence from Germany’s Reunification
Thomas P. Triebs, Justin Tumlinson
NBER Working Paper No. 19209, July 2013Communism in East Germany sought to dampen the effect of market forces on firm productivity for nearly 40 years. How did East German firms respond to the free market after being thrust into it in 1990? We use a formal learning model and German business survey data to analyze the lasting impact of this far-reaching treatment on the way firms in former East Germany predicted their own productivity relative to firms in former West Germany during the two decades since Reunification. We find in confirmation of our formal model’s predictions, that Eastern firms forecast productivity less accurately, particularly in dynamic and uncertain markets, but that the gap gradually closed over 12 to 13 years. Second, by analyzing the direction of firm level errors in conjunction with contemporaneous market signals we find that, in the years immediately following Reunification, Eastern firms estimate the market’s role as generally less potent than Western firm do, an observation consistent with overweighting experiences from the communist era; however, over roughly 14 years both converge to the same (incorrect) overestimate of the market’s role on their productivity.
I’m reminded of Mises’s remark that entrepreneurs, in a socialist economy, learn to excel at “diplomacy and bribery.” I suspect a study like Triebs and Tumlinson’s on political capabilities or skill at political entrepreneurship might yield the opposite result.
Sampling on the Dependent Variable, Robert Putnam Edition
| Peter Klein |
Famed sociologist Robert Putnam makes his case for government funding of social science research:
One of the harshest critics of National Science Foundation funding of political science has even praised my study [on civil society and democracy] as “one of the most influential pieces of practical research in the last half-century.”
Ironically, however, if the recent amendment by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) that restricts NSF funding for political science had been in effect when I began this research, it never would have gotten off the ground since the foundational grant that made this project possible came from the NSF Political Science Program.
Well, yes, if it hadn’t been for NASA, we wouldn’t have put a man on the moon. What this shows about the average or marginal productivity of government science funding is a little unclear to me.
Of course, Putnam’s piece is a short editorial making an emotional, rather than logical, appeal. But this kind of appeal seems to be all the political scientists have offered in response to the hated Coburn Amendment.
Culture, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation: French Edition
| Peter Klein |
Quote of the day, from Peter Gumbel’s France’s Got Talent: The Woeful Consequences of French Elitism, an interesting first-person account of the French educational system:
[T]he patterns of behavior established at [French] school appear to continue in later life, reproducing themselves most obviously in the workplace. If you learn from an early age that volunteering answers at school may prompt humiliating put-downs from your teachers, how active a participant will you be in office strategy discussions in the presence of an authoritarian boss? If working together in groups was discouraged as a child, how good a team player will you be as a grown-up? If you are made to believe as a 10-year-old that it’s worse to give a wrong answer than to give no answer at all, how will that influence your inclination to take risks?
I won’t repeat the apocryphal George W. Bush quote that “the problem with France’s economy is that the French have no word for entrepreneur,” but I will say that I have found French university students to be less aggressive than their US or Scandinavian equivalents. To be fair, when I’ve taught in France it has been in English, and I initially attributed the students’ reluctance to speak up, to answer questions, and to challenge the instructor to worries about English proficiency. But talking to French colleagues, and reading accounts like Gumbel’s (based on his experiences teaching at Sciences Po), I think the problem is largely cultural. The French system tends to favor conformity and memorization over creativity and spontaneity, which may or may not have a harmful effect on the performance of French organizations and French attitudes toward entrepreneurship and innovation.
I’m curious to know what our French readers think (but don’t hammer me with Bourdieu or Crozier references, please).
Mokyr on Cultural Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
I am wary of adding yet another conceptual margin for entrepreneurial action but I highly recommend a new (and for the moment, ungated) paper in the Scandinavian Economic History Review by the distinguished economic historian Joel Mokyr on “cultural entrepreneurship.” Starting from a broadly Schumpeterian perspective, Mokyr focuses on individuals who introduce and disseminate novel ideas:
[E]ach individual makes cultural choices taking as given what others believe. It is not a priori obvious how that affects one’s choices. It may affect them positively because conformism implies that there is some social cost associated with deviancy, or because people may reason that if the majority believes a certain thing, there may be wisdom in it (thus saving on information costs). But there can be a reverse reaction as well, with non-conformists perversely rebelling against existing beliefs. What matters for my purposes is that for a small number of individuals, the beliefs of others are not given but can be changed. I shall refer to those people as cultural entrepreneurs. Their function is much like entrepreneurs in the realm of production: individuals who refuse to take the existing technology or market structure as given and try to change it and, of course, benefit personally in the process. Much like other entrepreneurs, the vast bulk of them make fairly marginal changes in our cultural menus, but a few stand out as having affected them in substantial and palpable ways.
Succinctly expressed: “cultural entrepreneurs are the creators of epistemic focal points that people can coordinate their beliefs on.”
Mokyr’s focus, like Schumpeter’s, is not entrepreneurship per se, but its effects, particularly on long-run economic growth, and his entrepreneurship construct is somewhat undertheorized. But he provides fascinating examples, ranging from Mohammed and Luther to Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and Adam Smith. He focuses in particular on Bacon and Newton, describing Bacon’s work as “the coordination device which served as the point of departure for thinkers and experimentalists for two centuries to come. The economic effects of these changes remained latent and subterranean for many decades, but eventually they erupted in the Industrial Revolution and the subsequent processes of technological change.” Newton and the Royal Society “raise[d] the social standing of scientists and researchers as people who should be respected and supported and [provided] them with a comfortable material existence.” (Mostly good.)
I’m not an expert on cultural theory or history and am not sure how much the “cultural entrepreneur” construct ads to our understanding of cultural change (other than relabeling, a frequent worry in entrepreneurship studies). But the paper is a great read, highly provocative and informative, and addresses big questions. Check it out.
Autocrats in the Lab
| Peter Klein |
We noted before the Taylorite quality of many great restaurant kitchens. From Pierre Azoulay we learn that scientific laboratories are also sometimes organized as rigid hierarchies, presided over by an autocratic PI. (The key references is Pasteur.) Pierre suggests a sorting between PI and researcher characteristics so that labs run by autocrats are about as productive as labs run by softies. Probably the same is true in many groups. This reminds us that the Demsetz-Lehn critique applies to lots of work in management. If there is competition among organizational forms, and heterogeneity among individuals, then we shouldn’t expect one form to outperform the others, on average — a lesson often forgotten in empirical management research.
The Pace of Modern Life
| Peter Klein |
Technological advance and economic growth are ruining modern life — people don’t write long letters anymore, they don’t spend time together at meals, they speak quickly, and nobody stops to smell the roses. So said critics starting in 1871. A new entry for our “Nothing New under the Sun” series (via Josh Gans). NB: Some of you will tag 1871 as the start of modernity, for a different reason!
ISNIE 2013
| Peter Klein |
ISNIE is holding its annual conference next week in Florence. I hope to see many O&Mers there. Eric Maskin and Samuel Bowles are keynoting, and there are special tracks or sessions to honor Elinor Ostrom (who passed away last year) and Oliver Williamson (who recently turned 80).
Advice to Journal Editors
| Peter Klein |
The Story of French, a fun and interesting history of the French language by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow, offers a number of valuable insights for writers and editors. Aspiring journal editors could learn from François de Malherbe (1555–1628), described by Nadeau and Barlow as “the biggest and most brazen language snob the world has ever seen.” Despite being “a fretful fault-finder who spent his life attacking, both verbally and in writing, every mistake — or what he regarded as mistakes — he could find and anyone who made one,” Malherbe had sound editorial instincts. In particular, he valued simplicity and clarity and despised unnecessary verbiage.
As a pastime, Malherbe edited Ronsard’s poetry, removing about half the words. His future biographer, Honorat de Racan, once asked him, “Does this mean you approve of the rest?” Malherbe responded by erasing what was left on the page.
Tough, but fair. . . . Anyway, Malherbe was clearly onto something. He “preached the virtues of clarity, precision, and rigor” while denouncing “ornamentation, repetition, archaisms, regionalisms, and hyperbole.” Perhaps academic journals need a few more Malherbes.
Incentives Still Matter, Medical Care Edition
| Peter Klein |
Old-fashioned pay-for-performance schemes are about as fashionable these days as Taylorite hierarchy. In the academic and practitioner literatures on compensation and motivation, ideas about biases and heuristics, team motivation, trust, framing, etc., are in; work on agency costs and opportunism is out. So I was interested to see a new empirical paper on physician motivation — a randomized controlled trial set in Rwanda — with pretty conventional findings. Check it out:
Using Performance Incentives to Improve Medical Care Productivity and Health Outcomes
Paul Gertler, Christel Vermeersch
NBER Working Paper No. 19046, May 2013We nested a large-scale field experiment into the national rollout of the introduction of performance pay for medical care providers in Rwanda to study the effect of incentives for health care providers. In order to identify the effect of incentives separately from higher compensation, we held constant compensation across treatment and comparison groups – a portion of the treatment group’s compensation was based on performance whereas the compensation of the comparison group was fixed. The incentives led to a 20% increase in productivity, and significant improvements in child health. We also find evidence of a strong complementarity between performance incentives and baseline provider skill.
Rise of the Three-Essays Dissertation
| Peter Klein |
Almost all dissertations in economics and business are of the “three-essays” variety, rather than conventional book-length treatises. The main reason is pragmatic: economics, management, finance, accounting, etc. are mainly discussed in journal articles, not books. Students writing treatises must spend the first year post PhD converting the dissertation into articles for publication; why not write them that way from the start? (An extreme example — perhaps apocryphal — concerns Larry Summers, who began teaching at MIT several years before receiving his PhD from Harvard. Rumor has it he forgot to submit the PhD thesis, and simply bundled three of his published articles and turned it in.)
Some counter that the traditional model, or some variant of it, has value — for instance, the treatise conventionally includes a lengthy literature review, more than would be acceptable for a published journal article, which demonstrates the student’s mastery of the relevant literature. My view is that the standalone literature review is redundant at best; the student’s mastery of the material should be manifest in the research findings, without extra recitation of who said what. I tell students: don’t waste time putting anything in the dissertation that is not intended for publication!
The May 2013 AER has a piece by Wendy Stock and John Siegfried, “One Essay on Dissertation Formats in Economics,” on the essays-versus-treatise question. The evidence seems to weigh pretty heavily against the treatise:
Dissertations in economics have changed dramatically over the past forty years, from primarily treatise-length books to sets of essays on related topics. We document trends in essay-style dissertations across several metrics, using data on dissertation format, PhD program characteristics, demographics, job market outcomes, and early career research productivity for two large samples of US PhDs graduating in 1996-1997 or 2001-2002. Students at higher ranked PhD programs, citizens outside the United States, and microeconomics students have been at the forefront of this trend. Economics PhD graduates who take jobs as academics are more likely to have written essay-style dissertations, while those who take government jobs are more likely to have written a treatise. Finally, most of the evidence suggests that essay-style dissertations enhance economists’ early career research productivity.
The paywalled article is here; a pre-publication version is here. (Thanks to Laura McCann for the pointer.)
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.
Keynes in the Spotlight
| Peter Klein |
As the Niall Ferguson kerfuffle begins fading from memory it’s worth revisiting the underlying issue: What kind of person was John Maynard Keynes, and (how) did his social, cultural, moral, and aesthetic views affect his scientific work?
Here are a few recommended readings:
- Ralph Raico, “Was Keynes a Liberal?” (Independent Review, 2008)
- Schumpeter’s obituary of Keynes (AER, 1946)
- Murray Rothbard, “Keynes the Man” (in Dissent on Keynes, 1992)
These works are not kind to ole’ John Maynard (I’m posting them, what did you expect?). Rothbard, for example, emphasizes Keynes’s “overweening egotism, which assured him that he could handle all intellectual problems quickly and accurately and led him to scorn any general principles that might curb his unbridled ego,” also referring to Keynes’s “deep hatred and contempt for the values and virtues of the bourgeoisie,” including savings and thrift. It’s hard to imagine that Keynes’s personal views on thrift could be unrelated to the now-ubiquitous, über-Keynesian idea that spending, not savings and capital accumulation, is the driver of economic growth.
On time preference, and its social and cultural causes and consequences, I recommend Time and Public Policy by T. Alexander Smith (University of Tennessee Press, 1988), which unfortunately appears to be out of print. Here is a brief review by Israel Kirzner.
Online Education, Organizational Diversity, and Higher Education
| Peter Klein |
On this blog we’ve tended to celebrate, rather than denigrate, diversity in higher education. While others fear that MOOCs and other forms of online learning will cheapen the product, we think that “education,” like “health care,” is not a homogeneous blob but a set of discrete, marginal goods and services that can be offered in a variety of combinations, at different prices, and via many forms of delivery, local and remote. Naturally, the dominant incumbents try to resist the innovative incumbents by erecting entry barriers — what else would you expect?
A recent New Yorker piece on MOOCs recognizes this diversity, and makes the fundamental point that US higher education is already diverse — in other words, the digital revolution is simply pushing the industry down a path it was already going.
When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. When colleges appear in movies, they are verdant, tree-draped quadrangles set amid Georgian or Gothic (or Georgian-Gothic) buildings. When brochures from these schools arrive in the mail, they often look the same. Chances are, you’ll find a Byronic young man reading “Cartesian Meditations” on a bench beneath an elm tree, or perhaps his romantic cousin, the New England boy of fall, a tousle-haired chap with a knapsack slung back on one shoulder. He is walking with a lovely, earnest young woman who apparently likes scarves, and probably Shelley. They are smiling. Everyone is smiling. The professors, who are wearing friendly, Rick Moranis-style glasses, smile, though they’re hard at work at a large table with an eager student, sharing a splayed book and gesturing as if weighing two big, wholesome orbs of fruit. Universities are special places, we believe: gardens where chosen people escape their normal lives to cultivate the Life of the Mind.
But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States.
Most citizens of the elite world described above know little about the second world, but have a vague sense that it is cheap and tawdry (and that its uninformed consumers are exploited by fly-by-night, for-profit producers). The online revolution has already had a huge effect on vocational education, though most of the media attention is on the so-far modest, very marginal effects on the elite world.
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