Posts filed under ‘– Klein –’
Social Justice Quote of the Day
| Peter Klein |
Hayek, interviewed in 1983 by Encounter:
Hayek: “I regard ‘social justice’ as a nonsensical term….”
Interviewer: “But do we have the concept of the ‘social market economy’?”
Hayek: “May I tell you the story of when I last spoke to Dr. Ludwig Erhard? We were alone for a moment, and he turned to me and said, ‘I hope you don’t misunderstand me when I speak of a social market economy (Sozialen Marktwirtschaft). I mean by that that the market economy as such is social, not that it needs to be made social. . . .’ If you had to make the market economy ‘social,’ . . . you can justify every demand that cannot be reconciled with having the market determine prices and incomes. There’s no better way of destroying the market economy than with the concept of ‘social justice.'”
A New Approach to Multitask Agency Problems
| Peter Klein |
The standard approach to multiask agency problems is to recognize that, if the output of some tasks is more easily measured than the output of other tasks, than others, then piece-rate incentive schemes will lead to a distortion of effort toward the more easily monitored tasks. Ask a sales clerk to sell merchandise and keep the store clean and the displays spiffy, and pay on a commission basis, and you’ll get a messy store. A new paper by Omar Al-Ubaydli, Steffen Andersen, Uri Gneezy, and John List challenges this view, arguing that using a piece-rate schemes signals that the principal is a good monitor in general, which can motivate performance even on the not-easily-measured tasks in a multitask setting:
Carrots that Look Like Sticks: Toward an Understanding of Multitasking Incentive Schemes
Omar Al-Ubaydli, Steffen Andersen, Uri Gneezy, John A. List
NBER Working Paper No. 18453, October 2012Constructing compensation schemes for effort in multi-dimensional tasks is complex, particularly when some dimensions are not easily observable. When incentive schemes contractually reward workers for easily observed measures, such as quantity produced, the standard model predicts that unrewarded dimensions, such as quality, will be neglected. Yet, there remains mixed empirical evidence in favor of this standard principal-agent model prediction. This paper reconciles the literature by using both theory and empirical evidence. The theory outlines conditions under which principals can use a piece rate scheme to induce higher quantity and quality levels than analogous fixed wage schemes. Making use of a series of complementary laboratory and field experiments we show that this effect occurs because the agent is uncertain about the principal’s monitoring ability and the principal’s choice of a piece rate signals to the agent that she is efficient at monitoring.
Mormons in Management
| Peter Klein |
There’s an old joke about God calling the Pope. “I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that I’ve answered your prayer — I’m uniting all the world’s religions under one church and one leader.” Great, the Pope responds, what’s the bad news? “I’m calling from Salt Lake City.”
It’s commonly observed that the academic fields of strategy, organization, and entrepreneurship are over-represented by scholars from the Mormon faith: Christensen, Clark, Barney, Hoskisson, Dyer, Whetten, Zenger, and Felin, to name just a few. Often this is explained by superior social networking and the role of BYU as an anchor entity. But I don’t know any systematic academic research on the phenomenon.
A Wednesday HBR blog entry, “How Mormons Have Shaped Modern Management,” takes a different tack, focusing on the beliefs and practices of the Mormon church. An interesting read. See also a 2011 Business Week piece on the role of the Mormon mission.
Henry Manne at Missouri, on the Crisis in Higher Education
| Peter Klein |
Missouri friends, please join us next Tuesday for a lecture by Henry Manne on the governance and organization of US higher education institutions:
The Crisis in Higher Education:
Origins and Problems of University Governance
Henry G. Manne
Dean Emeritus, George Mason University Law School
Tuesday, October 23, 2012, 3:30-4:45pm
MU Student Center, Room 2206
University of Missouri
Sponsored by the Liberty and Justice Colloquium, University of Missouri
Free and Open to the Public
Henry G. Manne is Dean Emeritus of the George Mason School of Law and an expert on insider trading, legal education, university governance, and law and economics. He has also taught at St. Louis University, the University of Wisconsin, George Washington University, the University of Rochester, Stanford University, the University of Miami, Emory University, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern University.
Dean Manne is an Honorary Life Member of the American Law and Economics Association, which honored him as one of the four founders of the field of Law and Economics. He launched the Law and Economics Center at Emory University and the University of Miami before bringing it to George Mason University. His monograph, An Intellectual History of the School of Law, George Mason University, traces the development of the law and economics.
Dean Manne’s other writings include such seminal works as Insider Trading and the Stock Market, Wall Street in Transition (with E. Solomon), and “Mergers and the Market for Corporate Control” Journal of Political Economy, 1965). He is also a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. In 1999, the Case Western Reserve Law Review published the papers from a symposium honoring the many contributions of Dean Manne to the law and economics movement as The Legacy of Henry G. Manne. The Liberty Fund recently published The Collected Works of Henry G. Manne in three volumes.
Dean Manne holds a B.A. from Vanderbilt University (1950), J.D. from the University of Chicago (1952), J.S.D. from Yale University (1966), LL.D. from Seattle University (1987), and LL.D. from the Universidad Francesco Marroquin in Guatemala (1987).
Market Design
| Peter Klein |
A few quick thoughts on today’s Nobel Prize announcement. More later, once better informed people, from whom we can steal ideas, have weighed in.
- Market design is basically the study of exchange without prices. As most of economics deals with prices, this is a somewhat specialized subfield. The best-known example, courtesy of Al Roth, deals with kidney exchanges. Most economists will tell you that the best way to deal with shortages of transplantable organs like kidneys is to legalize kidney sales. (My friend Andy Barnett and the late David Kaserman wrote extensively on this.) If, for whatever reason, that is infeasible — Roth notes that many people find such sales “repugnant” — then various matching algorithms may be better than nothing. Roth and colleagues have studied and compared these matching algorithms.
- To get up to speed, Roth’s 2007 article in Harvard Business Review is probably a good place to start. For more technical comments see Josh Gans and Alex Tabarrok, and. Knowledge Problem is my go-to source for this kind of stuff, so I’m eagerly awaiting the commentary there.
- We discussed market design at O&M in 2007.
- Shapley’s contribution’s to cooperative game theory underlie Roth’s work. It’s a bit trite to point this out, but I’ll point out anyway that the huge popularity of game theory over the last three decades, particularly in IO and business strategy, rely almost entirely on noncooperative game theory, while the cooperative branch has been somewhat neglected. But bargaining is clearly important for strategy, organization, and entrepreneurship, so look for increased interest in this branch.
- Someone pointed out that Roth appears to be the first economics blogger to win the Nobel. (I’m not counting Krugman, who’s not what I’d call an academic blogger.)
- Enthusiasm among my informal circle of professional friends is muted. One suggests that, rather than take cultural resistance to the price mechanism (e.g., for kidney allocation) as exogenous, scholars should work to overcome this resistance. Another calls this “one of the most boring prizes yet. At best it is a prize for some no doubt useful ideas in some small contexts of effecting coordination, but the real coordinating marvel is the market.” A third calls Shapley’s UCLA lectures on cooperative game theory “the most useless classes that I took in college. . . we would go through one division rule after another to see which axioms they satisfied. When I asked him how you picked between different division rules that satisfied the same axioms, Lloyd said that it all depended on what conclusion that you wanted to reach.”
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.
Luigi Zingales Blogging on EconLog
| Peter Klein |
Luigi Zingales, an important contributor to organizational economics as well as finance and macroeconomics, and frequently cited here at O&M, is guest blogging at EconLog. I’m looking forward to his posts!
Does Strong Alumni Participation Make US Universities Stronger?
| Peter Klein |
What explains the dominance of the US in elite higher education? Shailendra Mehta offers a novel explanation: the role of alumni. Graduates of US colleges and universities tend to identify strongly with their institutions and care deeply about their school’s reputation and ranking. Only in the US do alumni play such a strong role, not only in financial support (often connected with athletics), but governance.
[N]o group cares more about a university’s prestige than its alumni, who gain or lose esteem as their alma mater’s ranking rises or falls.
Indeed, alumni have the most incentive to donate generously, and to manage the university effectively. Given their intimate knowledge of the university, alumni are also the most effective leaders. Through alumni networks, board members can acquire information quickly and act upon it without delay.
All great universities are nonprofit organizations, created to administer higher education, which benefits society as a whole. But US universities found a way to integrate competition’s benefits into the European concept of nonprofit, or so-called eleemosynary, corporations. The lack of profit does not diminish an alumni-dominated board’s incentive to compete for prestige by, for example, hiring distinguished faculty, accepting meritorious students, and striving for athletic or artistic achievement.
I asked Scott Masten, O&M’s resident higher-education expert, for a reaction:
Interesting, but incomplete. Although boards have formal authority in most universities, in practice they exercise very little, as the recent brouhaha at the University of Virginia serves to illustrate. In fact, the “American model” traces only to the post-Civil War era, when research universities came into being, and effective authority devolved to varying degrees to an administrative bureaucracy and faculty. It was only following that period that U.S. institutions began their dominance. On that alone, one could argue just as convincingly that it was faculty governance that accounted for the success of American higher education. It seems to me there’s a paper on that out there somewhere.
Arruñada’s Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange
| Peter Klein |
Former O&M guest blogger Benito Arruñada has a new book, Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange: Theory and Policy of Contractual Registries (University of Chicago Press, 2012), presenting his influential and important work on the measurement of property rights and transaction costs. Here’s the blurb:
Governments and development agencies spend considerable resources building property and company registries to protect property rights. When these efforts succeed, owners feel secure enough to invest in their property and banks are able use it as collateral for credit. Similarly, firms prosper when entrepreneurs can transform their firms into legal entities and thus contract more safely. Unfortunately, developing registries is harder than it may seem to observers, especially in developed countries, where registries are often taken for granted. As a result, policies in this area usually disappoint.
Benito Arruñada aims to avoid such failures by deepening our understanding of both the value of registries and the organizational requirements for constructing them. Presenting a theory of how registries strengthen property rights and reduce transaction costs, he analyzes the major trade-offs and proposes principles for successfully building registries in countries at different stages of development. Arruñada focuses on land and company registries, explaining the difficulties they face, including current challenges like the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States and the dubious efforts made in developing countries toward universal land titling. Broadening the account, he extends his analytical framework to other registries, including intellectual property and organized exchanges of financial derivatives. With its nuanced presentation of the theoretical and practical implications, Institutional Foundations of Impersonal Exchange significantly expands our understanding of how public registries facilitate economic growth.
My copy is on the way, and I’m eagerly looking forward to reading it!
18 September 2012 at 12:04 pm Peter G. Klein Leave a comment
First, They Ignore You. . . .
| Peter Klein |
Paul Krugman writes a typically silly column on the Austrian school’s approach to defining the money supply. As usual, his purpose is not to inform, or analyze, or explore, but to ridicule anyone who disagrees with The Paul. A few reactions:
- The substantive question, do Austrians consider money-market mutual funds as part of the money supply, is easily answered with 30 seconds of research, which is apparently more than Paul could muster up. Paul, use The Google!
- Krugman frequently mocks ideas he does not understand, so his tone and style here are hardly surprising. But it’s interesting that he finds Ron Paul’s “hard-money” views influential enough to mention.
- Krugman seems to believe that the Republican Establishment, and Paul Ryan in particular, are in thrall to the economic teachings of the Austrian school, which would be news to everyone in the Republican Establishment and the Austrian school. In his defense, I think Krugman recognizes only Krugman and non-Krugman, so he cannot quite grasp that there may be some diversity among his critics.
- Krugman dimly recognizes that Austrians have some objections to fractional-reserve banking in connection with government intervention, and sneers that “[t]his is historically wrong, but maybe the actual history of banking is deep enough in the past for that wrongness to get missed.” He also seem to think that Austrians want to ban the use of money-market mutual funds. Of course, Krugman has never read anything written by an Austrian economist, and he offers no citations or quotes, so it’s hard to know where he gets these ideas. To my knowledge. no Austrian has called for banning MMMFs. On fractional-reserve banking, the opinion among Austrian scholars ranges from those who think FRB is inherently unworkable and illegitimate and could not survive apart from government intervention (most Rothbardians) to those who think that private FRB is legitimate and workable but that the current system of government deposit insurance, government fiat currency as the base money, the Fed as the lender of last resort, etc. is inefficient and illegitimate (Larry White, George Selgin). Needless to say, Austrian scholars have written thousands of pages on these issues, including detailed studies of the history of banking. Krugman apparently thinks Austrians are merely journalists or propagandists, as he himself has become.
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.
The Wrong Way to Measure Returns to Public Science Funding
| Peter Klein |
A new Milken Institute report purports to show that “[t]he benefit from every dollar invested by National Institutes of Health (NIH) outweighs the cost by many times. When we consider the economic benefits realized as a result of decrease in mortality and morbidity of all other diseases, the direct and indirect effects (such as increases in work-related productivity) are phenomenal.” There are so many problems with the study I hardly know where to begin. For instance:
1. The authors measure long-term benefit to society as real GDP for the bioscience industries. This is a strange proxy. It is well-known that one of the major impact of public science funding is higher wages for science workers. It is hardly surprising that NIH funding results in higher wages and profits for those in the bioscience industry. Moreover, even if industry activity were the variable of interest, don’t we care about the composition of that activity, not the amount? Which projects were stimulated by NIH funding, and were they the right ones?
2. The results are based on a panel regression of the following equation:
Real GDP for the bioscience industries = f (employment in bioscience industry, labor skill, capital stock, real NIH funding, Industrial R&D in all industries) + state fixed effects + error term.
They interpret the coefficient on NIH funding as the causal effect of NIH funding on bioscience performance. E.g.: “Preliminary results show that the long-term effect of a $1.00 increase in NIH funding will increase the size (output) of the bioscience industry by at least $1.70.” But all the right-hand-side variables are potentially endogenous. For instance, the positive correlation between the dependent variable and NIH funding could reflect winner-picking: the NIH funds projects that are likely to be successful, with or without NIH funding. (The authors briefly mention endogeneity but dismiss it as unimportant.)
This is a version of the basic methodological flaw I attributed to the the political scientists lobbying for NSF money. The issue in question — even assuming the dependent variable is a reasonable measure of social benefit — is what bioscience industry output would have been in the absence of NIH funding. (And, even more important, what would have been the direction of that activity.) Public funding could crowd out private funding, and almost certainly changes the direction of research activity, for good or ill.
3. There are a host of econometric problems, aside from endogeneity — no year fixed effects, no interactions between federal and private funds, the imposition of linear relationships, etc.
If I’m being unfair to the authors, I hope readers will correct me. But this looks to me like another example of special pleading, not careful analysis.
Conference in Honor of Oliver Williamson
| Peter Klein |
The University Paris-Dauphine is awarding an honorary doctorate to Oliver Williamson Friday, 19 October 2012, and organizing a one-day conference to honor his work. The conference is co-sponsored by the European School on New Institutional Economics (ESNIE). Speakers include Carmine Guerriero (U. of Amsterdam), Roger Guesnerie (Collège de France), David Martimort (EHESS & PSE), Marian Moszoro (IESE Business School, Barcelona), Jens Prüfer (Tilburg U.), and Brian Silverman (Rotman Business School, U. of Toronto), and Williamson will give a speech during the formal award ceremony. Registration is required. See the conference website for details.
More on Obsolete Technologies
| Peter Klein |
Following up an earlier post on the longevity of obsolete technologies, as specialty markets: Francesco Schiavone has a nice paper, “Vintage Innovation: How to Improve the Service Characteristics and Costumer Effectiveness of Products becoming Obsolete,” reviewing the core theory and discussing the case of the analog turntable (little did I know, not being a club DJ, that you can by a “vinyl emulator” to go wacka-wacka-wacka on your MP3s). Francesco’s Vintage Innovation website has more examples. Check it out!
Carpenter’s Strategy Toolbox
| Peter Klein |
Carpenter’s Strategy Toolbox, named for the late Mason Carpenter, is a terrific resource for teachers in strategic management and related fields. Here’s an advertisement from former guest blogger Russ Coff:
Some of you may be familiar with Mason Carpenter’s old teaching toolkit. I have initiated a new site that includes everything from that site plus quite a few additional exercises and videos. Please check it out at:
www.CarpenterStrategyToolbox.com
You can filter by type of tool (exercise, video, etc.) using the tabs at the top or you can filter by topic (entrepreneurship, 5 forces, RBV, global, alliances, etc.) using the categories on the right side. You should find something useful in no time at all.
Here are links to a few exercises and resources that you might find especially useful (to give you a quick feel):
- Egg Drop Auction is an exercise where profit is determined by finding new uses for materials that others did not anticipate.
- Blue Ocean Strategy summary video (plus several related videos like Cirque Du Soliel).
- Tinkertoy exercise for scenario planning or first mover advantage.
- Entrepreneurship and innovation tool page. This is a listing of the resources that are tagged for entrepreneurship content.
Please help make the site more useful:
- Comment on tools you have used (adding tips, etc.)
- Submit new tools so the resource is always growing
- Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions
Do Bosses Matter?
| Peter Klein |
Do bosses matter? Stephen Marglin famously argued that management doesn’t affect productivity, just the share of output appropriated by managers. (I’ll take David Landes instead, thank you very much.) Despite a huge management literature on bosses, economists have not quite known how to answer the question. Ed Lazear, Kathryn Shaw (ironically, a former boss of mine), and Christopher Stanton have an interesting new take on this using detailed microdata, showing substantial effects of supervisor on worker productivity:
The Value of Bosses
Edward P. Lazear, Kathryn L. Shaw, Christopher T. Stanton
NBER Working Paper No. 18317, August 2012Do supervisors enhance productivity? Arguably, the most important relationship in the firm is between worker and supervisor. The supervisor may hire, fire, assign work, instruct, motivate and reward workers. Models of incentives and productivity build at least some subset of these functions in explicitly, but because of lack of data, little work exists that demonstrates the importance of bosses and the channels through which their productivity enhancing effects operate. As more data become available, it is possible to examine the effects of people and practices on productivity. Using a company-based data set on the productivity of technology-based services workers, supervisor effects are estimated and found to be large. Three findings stand out. First, the choice of boss matters. There is substantial variation in boss quality as measured by the effect on worker productivity. Replacing a boss who is in the lower 10% of boss quality with one who is in the upper 10% of boss quality increases a team’s total output by about the same amount as would adding one worker to a nine member team. Using a normalization, this implies that the average boss is about 1.75 times as productive as the average worker. Second, boss’s primary activity is teaching skills that persist. Third, efficient assignment allocates the better bosses to the better workers because good bosses increase the productivity of high quality workers by more than that of low quality workers.
NB: For some reason, my graduate students are circulating this piece from last week’s WSJ.
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.
Management Scholars and the Media
| Peter Klein |
Reporting today from the Academy of Management meetingin Boston. Too many interesting sessions to list them all. Today I attended a very good Professional Development Workshop on the opportunity-discovery perspective in entrepreneurship studies, organized by Henrik Berglund, Steffen Korsgaard, and Kåre Moberg and featuring Bill Gartner, Per Davidsson, and others. Lots of discussion of “discovery opportunities” and “creation opportunities,” and even my own case for dropping the concept of opportunities altogether.
Then, a PDW session called “Engaging the Media: Equipping Management Faculty to Share Their Knowledge More Effectively” featuring me, Jay Barney, Ron Mitchell, Maria Minniti, Mike Lenox, and Scott Kirsner, an ambassador from the world of journalism. I gave the blogger’s perspective, arguing for this medium as an effective way of sharing research results and informed opinion with students, journalists, policymakers, and the lay public. I also shared some practical tips borrowed from Mike Munger.
During the session there was a lot of discussion of economics, and how economists have been much more successful than management scholars at engaging the media. I argued that this has less to do with technique than with substance — economists have a long history of involvement with key social and policy issues of interest to journalists. But there are pitfalls to such a cozy relationship. The desire for relevance and influence can lead to compromise on rigor and and a loss of independence (Exhibit A). Management scholarship is already prone to faddishness and buzzwords, and a closer engagement with the media could exacerbate those unfortunate trends.
But, a question near and dear to our hearts here at O&M: Why are there so few academic blogs devoted to management and organizational scholarship? Economics and law have many influential academic blogs. Management has just a handful (most linked from our sidebar). When I talk to management colleagues about blogging, manyt are reluctant. Will I have something to say? How much time will it take? Will it hurt my academic reputation? Economists don’t seem too worried about these. In part, the difference may be due to core theories and approaches. A little economic theory goes a long way in addressing social and policy issues, and most economists feel comfortable talking about current events without deep knowledge of the specifics. “It involves a price control? Well, let me tell you how that will play out…” Management scholarship is far more eclectic and often calls for deeper knowledge of the concrete phenomena at hand. Is this the most important difference? Or are there other reasons why management scholars don’t blog?
Hierarchy, French Style
| Peter Klein |
The French love hierarchy, right? Well, yes, but all hierarchies are not alike. Here’s a comoprehensive study of French manufacturing firms:
The Anatomy of French Production Hierarchies
Lorenzo Caliendo, Ferdinando Monte, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg
NBER Working Paper No. 18259, July 2012We use a comprehensive dataset of French manufacturing firms to study their internal organization. We first divide the employees of each firm into `layers’ using occupational categories. Layers are hierarchical in that the typical worker in a higher layer earns more, and the typical firm occupies less of them. In addition, the probability of adding (dropping) a layer is very positively (negatively) correlated with value added. We then explore the changes in the wages and number of employees that accompany expansions in layers, output, or markets (by becoming exporters). The empirical results indicate that reorganization, through changes in layers, is key to understand how firms expand and contract. For example, we find that firms that expand substantially add layers and pay lower average wages in all pre-existing layers. In contrast, firms that expand little and do not reorganize pay higher average wages in all pre-existing layers.
Conference Honoring Larry Ribstein
| Peter Klein |
I only met Larry Ribstein a few times but was deeply impressed with his erudition and insight. He is best known for his work on unincorporated businesses but was an expert in a number of areas of business law (as well as music and cinema).
This November the GMU Law School is hosting a conference in his honor, “Unlocking the Law: Building on the Work of Professor Larry Ribstein.” Speakers include Henry Manne, Richard Epstein, Gillian Hatfield, Todd Henderson, Cliff Whinston, and many others. Hit the link above for the details.
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments