Posts filed under ‘New Institutional Economics’
Baylor University PhD Program in Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
Much as I hate to use this blog for self-promotion, … Hahahahaha. OK, seriously. As many of you know I joined Baylor University this fall and will be heavily involved with Baylor’s new PhD program in Entrepreneurship. Prospective students interested in entrepreneurship, strategy, organizational economics, innovation, creativity, institutions, business history, governance, the theory of science, Austrian economics — i.e., the regular topics of this blog — should consider applying. Detailed information about the program, including application materials and instructions, are on the program website. The formal deadline for Fall 2016 admission is next Friday, January 15, so time is short! I’m happy to answer any questions.
Yoram Barzel’s Tribute to Doug North
A guest post by Yoram Barzel.
Doug North, Some Reminiscences
| By Yoram Barzel |
By the time I arrived at the University of Washington in 1961, Doug had been there for a decade, and he stayed for two more. Moving from one Washington (the University of Washington in Seattle) to another Washington (Washington University in St. Louis) is confusing. Most people associate Doug’s career with Washington University in St. Louis, but it was in Seattle that he did the bulk of the work for which he won the Nobel Prize. His work is well known, and I focus on other aspects of his career and on personal memories.
Doug got his PhD from Berkeley, and he was the first to admit that he hadn’t learned much there. Throughout his time in Seattle, when he needed advice when it came to economic analysis, he asked for it with great humility. Doug had a keen sense regarding which individuals to listen to, and it seems to me that this ability was a major contributor to his productiveness.
The most prominent colleague to provide that advice was the late Don Gordon. Don is not well known, but he was great economist and the intellectual leader of the department. He cherished Doug’s great wisdom. Don persuaded Doug that the right way to do economic research was by testing hypotheses based on sound economic reasoning, and suggested to Doug to apply these in his economic history research; an almost revolutionary approach at the time. Equally revolutionary was Doug’s requirement of his doctoral students to acquire these tools. Doug and Don became close colleagues and intellectual allies and remained lifetime friends.
The tools that Don recommended weren’t in great supply at the UW economics department at that time, and Doug and Don fought hard in an essentially hostile environment to ensure that new hires would possess these skills. By the late 1950s they won the fight, most likely because Doug was an extremely skilled fighter. (more…)
Weingast on North
| Peter Klein |
Barry Weingast remembers Doug North at EH.Net (also at the SIOE blog):
His first book, The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790-1860 (1960), helped foster the revolution that came to be known as the “new economic history,” the application of frontier economics to the study problems of the past. He and Bob Fogel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (1993) largely for their leadership in this new research program.
But Doug understood that the neoclassical economics on which he was raised was inadequate to address the problems he sought to answer, namely, why are a few countries rich while most remain poor, some in dire poverty? Much of his best work addressed this question.
Read the whole thing here.
John Nye Remembers Doug North
A guest post by John V. C. Nye. A related version appears at Reason.
| John Nye |
Douglass Cecil North passed away at the age of 95 on Nov. 23, 2015 at his home in Michigan. Joint recipient of the 1993 Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, he will be remembered for his path breaking contributions to the field of economic history and his central role in creating the New Institutional Economics. He spent most of his academic career at two institutions — the University of Washington in Seattle, and Washington University in St. Louis. For much of the last two decades, he also maintained an association with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Doug will be remembered for many things and others can go through his list of honors, awards, and accomplishments. But for me, two things will always stand out — his devotion to his students and his personal role in my life as mentor, colleague, and friend.
On the first point, one could note the large number of great scholars who emerged under his supervision in both Seattle and St. Louis or those who were simply inspired by his teaching to pursue careers in academia. But perhaps it is sufficient to observe that when the Jonathan Hughes Memorial Prize in teaching was instituted by the Economic History Society, North was the first recipient and an overwhelming favorite — not least of which because Jon Hughes had been one of Douglass’s first graduate students. On the day North received the Nobel prize, he cut off his interviewers to teach his regular courses, and reporters got a first-hand look at North the teacher. (more…)
Douglass C. North (1920-2015)
| Peter Klein |
I’m sorry to report that Doug North passed away yesterday at the age of 95. North was a key figure in the “cliometrics revolution” which sought to apply neoclassical economic theory and quantitative methods to the study of economic history, for which he received a Nobel Prize. He was also a founder, along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, of the “New Institutional Economics.” His work on economic growth, the role of institutions on national and international economic performance, the relationship between economic and political institutions, and many other fields has been extremely influential.
I don’t yet see many obituaries online but they will appear soon in the usual places. Here are some previous O&M posts on North. Here’s his Wikipedia entry. We’ll add some detailed commentaries soon.
I met North at the inaugural ISNIE conference in St. Louis in 1997, and saw him occasionally after that. He was friendly and approachable and interested in the work of younger scholars. North was an interdisciplinary thinker but always considered himself an economist first and foremost. I remember a small-group dinner at which he revealed an interesting conversation among the founders of International Society for New Institutional Economics (now SIOE). Coase had proposed calling the new organization the “International Society for New Institutional Social Science.” North reported that he replied, “Ronald, if you call it that, I will wish you well, but I won’t ever attend!”
Here is a nice reminiscence from Mike Sykuta.
Update: Here are obits in the NYT and WaPo. The former describes North in a way that makes economic history sound pretty interesting: “a diminutive, effervescent bon vivant [who] indulged his interests in haute cuisine, photography, fast cars, flying his own plane, hunting, fishing, tennis, hiking and swimming, pursuing some of them into advanced age.” (There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about Washington University agreeing to pay North’s moving expenses when he took a professorship in St. Louis, then finding out later that transporting his wine collection required a refrigerated truck costing tens of thousands of dollars.)
Update 2: Here is Barry Weingast’s reminiscence, which appeared originally at EH.Net.
Woodward on Alchian
| Peter Klein |
Alchian and me, circa 2000.
Armen Alchian’s friend and colleague Susan Woodward has a nice piece in a forthcoming Journal of Corporate Finance special issue on Alchian. Here are a few passages that may be of special interest to O&Mers:
Orley Ashenfelter asked Armen to write a book review of Oliver Williamson’s The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (such a brilliant title!). I got enlisted for that project too (Alchian and Woodward (1988)). Armen began writing, but I went back to reread Institutions of Capitalism. Armen gave me what he had written, and I was baffled. “Armen, this stuff isn’t in Williamson.” He asked, “Well, did he get it wrong?” I said, “No, it’s not that he got it wrong. These issues just aren’t there at all. You attribute these ideas to him, but they really come from our other paper.” And he said “Oh, well, don’t worry about that. Some historian will sort it out later. It’s a good place to promote these ideas, and they’ll get the right story eventually.” So, dear reader, now you know.
This from someone who spent his life discussing the efficiencies of private property and property rights—to basically give ideas away in order to promote them? It was a good lesson.
Of course, the book review also had a brilliant title: “The Firm is Dead: Long Live the Firm!” It also introduced the term “plasticity” as a not-quite-substitute for asset specificity. (I still prefer the more precise term relationship-specific investment.) And this:
Armen had no use for formal models that did not teach us to look somewhere new in the known world, nor had he any patience for findings that relied on fancy econometrics. What was Armen’s idea of econometrics? Merton Miller told me. We were chatting about limited liability. Merton asked about evidence. Well, all public firms with transferable shares now have limited liability. But in private, closely-held firms, loans nearly always explicitly specify which of the owner’s personal assets are pledged against bank loans. “How do you know?” “From conversations with bankers.” Merton said said, “Ah, this sounds like UCLA econometrics! You go to Armen Alchian and you ask, ‘Armen, is this number about right?’ And Armen says, ‘Yeah, that sounds right.’ So you use that number.”
Masahiko Aoki
| Dick Langlois |
I was saddened to learn that Masa Aoki passed away on July 15. He was only 77. Masa was a towering figure in the economics of institutions and organizations, and a true gentleman.
ISNIE is now SIOE
| Peter Klein |
I’ve long been involved with the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE). (In fact, I first met the esteemed Professor Foss at the inaugural ISNIE conference in St. Louis in 1997.) ISNIE was established as an global academic society promoting the study of institutions within the broad tradition established by the organization’s co-founders Ronald Coase, Oliver Williamson, and Douglass North. ISNIE has been a great success, holding annual conferences in the US and Europe, sponsoring an important working-paper series, and boasting thousands of members from all over the world.
Times change, and over the last two decades the study of institutions has moved from the periphery towards the center of economic, social, political, and legal analysis. The statement, “institutions matter,” which might have been controversial in social science in the 1990s, seems trite today. As such, some of ISNIE’s leaders and members saw a need to reposition and rebrand the society to reflect the current academic and policy climate. Last year ISNIE’s members voted, and this year the board approved, a name change. The organization is now SIOE, the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics. Along with the change is a new website, featuring news, information, a blog, and many other features. The site is a work in progress and editors Bruno Chaves and Jens Prüfer would be happy to receive comments and suggestions.
I’m looking forward to the next twenty years with SIOE!
Essays in Honor of Joel Mokyr
| Peter Klein |
O&M friends Avner Greif, Lynne Kiesling, and John Nye have edited an important collection of essays by students, colleagues, and friends of the distinguished economic historian Joel Mokyr: Institutions, Innovation, and Industrialization: Essays in Economic History and Development (Princeton University Press, 2015). Dust-jacket blurb:
This book brings together a group of leading economic historians to examine how institutions, innovation, and industrialization have determined the development of nations. Presented in honor of Joel Mokyr — arguably the preeminent economic historian of his generation–these wide-ranging essays address a host of core economic questions. What are the origins of markets? How do governments shape our economic fortunes? What role has entrepreneurship played in the rise and success of capitalism? Tackling these and other issues, the book looks at coercion and exchange in the markets of twelfth-century China, sovereign debt in the age of Philip II of Spain, the regulation of child labor in nineteenth-century Europe, meat provisioning in pre-Civil War New York, aircraft manufacturing before World War I, and more. The book also features an essay that surveys Mokyr’s important contributions to the field of economic history, and an essay by Mokyr himself on the origins of the Industrial Revolution.
Here are some useful book reviews by Doug Allen and Robert Margo, and here is some interesting dialogue between Mokyr, Nye, and Deirdre McCloskey as comments on an article by Don Boudreaux.
The Judgment-Based View of Entrepreneurship: Accomplishments, Challenges, New Directions
| Peter Klein |
We have been using the term “judgment-based view” to describe our approach to entrepreneurship. The term “judgment” of course comes from Knight, and was used also by Mises, Casson, and many others. Contemporary entrepreneurship research is still dominated by the opportunity-discovery view, but increasing criticism from the judgement-based view, the effectuation and bricolage approaches, the opportunity-creation view, and other perspectives is challenging the notion that profit opportunities exist, waiting to be discovered, and even that “opportunity” is a meaningful construct at all.
Nicolai and I organized a themed section in the Journal of Institutional Economics on the judgment-based view with papers from Niklas Halberg, Jeff McMullen, and Andrew Godley and Mark Casson. Our introduction reviews the increasing importance of entrepreneurship in economics and management research, explains the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic organization, discusses some microfoundations of judgment, and distinguishes judgment from luck and judgment per se from good or skilled judgments.
The papers are available electronically at the links above, and in hardcopy in the Fall 2015 issue of JOIE.
The Mark of a Good Library
| Peter Klein |
I took this photo in the conference room of the Beijing Information Science and Technology University, School of Economics and Management. A display case holds a large collection of Chinese works and just two books in English. Most of you will recognize the silver one with the blue letters. Now, where is Organizing Entrepreneurial Judgment?
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.
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).
“Robert Bork’s Forgotten Role in the Transaction Cost Revolution”
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to Danny Sokol for passing on this paper by Alan Meese.
Robert Bork’s Forgotten Role in the Transaction Cost Revolution
Alan J. Meese
Antitrust Law Journal 79, no. 3 (2014)This essay, prepared for a conference examining Robert Bork’s antitrust contributions, examines Bork’s hitherto unknown role in the transaction cost economics (“TCE”) revolution. The essay recounts how, in 1966, Bork helped rediscover Coase’s 1937 article, The Nature of the Firm and employed Coase’s reasoning to explain how various forms of partial integration could reduce transaction costs. As the essay shows, Bork described how exclusive territories, customer restrictions and horizontal minimum price fixing that accompanied otherwise valid integration were voluntary efforts to overcome the costs of relying upon unfettered markets to conduct economic activity. To be sure, Bork did not develop a complete account of TCE capable of informing a full-fledged research program. Nonetheless, Bork did articulate and apply various tools of TCE, tools that reflected departures from the applied price theory tradition of industrial organization.
The essay also offers some brief speculation regarding why scholars have not recognized Bork’s early contributions to TCE. For one thing, Bork did not purport to offer a new economic paradigm. Instead, Bork repeatedly characterized his work as an application of basic price theory, the very economic paradigm that TCE overthrew with respect to the interpretation of non-standard contracts. Moreover, Bork did not persist in his critique of price theory’s once-dominant account of non-standard contracts. After reiterating his views in 1968, for instance, he did not revisit the economics of non-standard agreements for nearly a decade. Finally, when Bork did return to the topic, he deemphasized TCE-based arguments and focused more on the claim that such agreements could not add to the market power already possessed by manufacturers and thus could not produce economic harm. In short, Bork’s failure to reiterate his TCE-based interpretation of non-standard agreements seems partly responsible for the lack of recognition his early contributions have received.
On Bork see also Jack High’s useful 1984 paper, “Bork’s Paradox: Static vs. Dynamic Efficiency in Antitrust Analysis.”
Upcoming Workshops, Seminars, and Events
| Peter Klein |
Some upcoming events of interest to O&M readers:
- “Research and Policy Change Inspired by Ronald Coase,” 27-28 March 2015, Washington DC
- Berkeley-Paris Organizational Economics Workshop, 10-11 April 2015, Paris
- BHC/EBHA Workshop Historical Approaches to Entrepreneurship Theory & Research, 24 June 2015, Miami FL
- TILEC Economic Governance Workshop, “Economic Governance and Social Preferences,” 3-4 September 2015, Tilburg
Bottom-up Approaches to Economic Development
| Peter Klein |
Via Michael Strong, a thoughtful review and critique of Western-style economic development programs and their focus on one-size-fits-all, “big idea” approaches. Writing in the New Republic, Michael Hobbs takes on not only Bono and Jeff Sachs and USAID and the usual suspects, but even the randomized-controlled-trials crowd, or “randomistas,” like Duflo and Banerjee. Instead of searching for the big idea, thinking that “once we identify the correct one, we can simply unfurl it on the entire developing world like a picnic blanket,” we should support local, incremental, experimental, attempts to improve social and economic well being — a Hayekian bottom-up approach.
We all understand that every ecosystem, each forest floor or coral reef, is the result of millions of interactions between its constituent parts, a balance of all the aggregated adaptations of plants and animals to their climate and each other. Adding a non-native species, or removing one that has always been there, changes these relationships in ways that are too intertwined and complicated to predict. . . .
[I]nternational development is just such an invasive species. Why Dertu doesn’t have a vaccination clinic, why Kenyan schoolkids can’t read, it’s a combination of culture, politics, history, laws, infrastructure, individuals—all of a society’s component parts, their harmony and their discord, working as one organism. Introducing something foreign into that system—millions in donor cash, dozens of trained personnel and equipment, U.N. Land Rovers—causes it to adapt in ways you can’t predict.
SMS Special Conference, “From Local Voids to Local Goods: Can Institutions Promote Competitive Advantage?”
| Peter Klein |
Please consider submitting a proposal to the upcoming SMS Special Conference in Santiago, Chile, 19-21 March 2015, on the theme “From Local Voids to Local Goods: Can Institutions Promote Competitive Advantage?” Here’s the description:
A recent stream of strategy research has examined how institutional voids pose fundamental challenges for industrial development in emerging markets, which bring detrimental effects to the competitiveness of local firms. Yet, in many countries, policymakers, to various degrees and levels, have adopted a rather positive agenda, to try and foster local firms through the provision of public resources, such as investments in infrastructure, specialized industrial policies, as well as knowledge-generation systems. Concomitantly, firms themselves have pursued collective synergies that individual firms alone would be able to attain. In sum, strategies embedded in the local environment may promote rather than limit competitive advantage. To advance this discussion, we are gathering a group of established scholars and practitioners in Santiago, one of the most modern Latin American cities. Chile is also well known for its distinctive institutional reforms, which promote a thriving business climate. The Conference will thus offer a unique opportunity to discuss how firms and institutions interact to spur entrepreneurship and development.
I am chairing the track on “Institutions and Local Entrepreneurship,” and looking for papers dealing broadly with the relationships among legal, political, and social institutions, entrepreneurship (broadly defined), public policy, and economic performance. I would love to see submissions from O&Mers. The submission deadline (extended abstract, not full paper) is 15 October 2014, just around the corner. Let me know if you have any questions.
The WINIR Greenwich Conference
| Dick Langlois |
I write on the flight back from the inaugural conference of the World Interdisciplinary Network for Institutional Research (WINIR), which met on the Prime Meridian these last few days. The conference was a great success, not only for its wonderful location in the Old Royal Naval College astride the Cutty Sark but also for the overall quality of the organization and the presentations.
As I have mentioned before, WINIR was created to encourage institutional research from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. The annual conference institutionalizes this (you might say) by having keynote speakers from five different disciplines. The political scientist was Kathleen Thelen from MIT, one of my fellow editors on the Journal of Institutional Economics; the legal scholar was Katharina Pistor from Columbia; and the sociologist was Geoffrey Ingham from Cambridge, who made some interesting observations about Chinese institutions in the context of the “great divergence” debate in economic history. Serious and well-known scholars all. The economist was Timur Kuran, who updated us on his fascinating work on the economics of the pre-nineteenth-century Islamic waqf. But the most interesting – or at any rate most surprising – keynote was the philosopher Barry Smith from Buffalo, whom some of you may have heard of for his early work on the philosophy of Austrian economics. Smith’s talk was about “ontology,” which in my ignorance I had expected to be an hour of head-breaking essentialism. It turns out that “ontology” now means the practice of classification – giving things the right names and putting them in the right boxes. As much computer science as philosophy, it seemed to me. The main applications are in databases and sciences more generally, including things like Department of Defense databases and Human Genome data. Smith is a world-leading practitioner of this kind of ontology, having founded something called the National Center for Ontological Research. (I must confess that the first thing that popped into my mind when I heard this title was the High-Energy Magic Building at Terry Pratchett’s Unseen University.) Basically, ontology appears to be about modularization and standardization, something quite fitting to talk about in the shadow of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. I discovered that Smith was unaware of the modularity literature, so I plan to send him some references.
Many of the parallel sessions were also of high quality. I could attend only a fraction of them (what with sneaking out to visit the longitude exhibit at the National Maritime Museum). But let me plug a couple of papers by my friends. Giampaolo Garzarelli and Lyndal Keeton modeled “internal exit” in pre-colonial Southern Africa, the fissioning off of subtribal groups to found new polities. (I was impressed with the quality of that entire session.) As I was chairing a competing session later, I missed Roger Koppl and Caryn Devin talking about their paper “Against Design,” written with Stuart Kauffman and Teppo Felin. A version of that collaboration will appear in JOIE as a target article with solicited comments. (more…)
Theories of the Firm
| Peter Klein |
At the recent Academy of Management conference in Philadelphia I was pleased to participate in a pre-conference workshop organized by Paul Drnevich, Larry Tribble, and David Croson, “Theories and Their Words: A Cross-Academy Discussion of Perspectives on Value Creation and Capture.” From the blurb:
In this workshop a panel of senior and emerging scholars provides a forum to examine and discuss the roles and implications of several prominent management theories and their differing terminology for creating and capturing value. Our distinguished panelists will provide an overview of the value implications of several well-known foundational theories of the existence and purpose of business organizations: Transaction Cost Economics (TCE), Property Rights Theory (PRT), the Capabilities and Resource-based View (RBV), and Industrial Organization (IO), discuss challenges often encountered in efforts to integrate these theories and their terminology, and explore commonalities and intersections across these perspectives that may yield opportunities for future research. We provide perspectives from the distinguished scholars as a means of clarifying how each theory explains the core concepts of value creation and value capture, without which a sustainable business cannot exist. We then offer a discussion of points of commonality and integration of the theories around value creation and value capture with an open forum Q&A session with the presenters regarding directions for future research. We conclude with round-table breakout discussions, each led by a senior scholar and focused on a specific aspect of the theory they presented for more detailed discussion of future research in that theoretical stream.
The presentations from the workshop are online here. You may find them interesting for for research and for teaching. My own presentation on strategy and transaction cost economics covered the basics of TCE and asked if TCE is really a theory of strategy (short answer: no and yes).
Update: Mike Ryall’s presentation is viewable here.
Microeconomics of Central Banking
| Peter Klein |
I have a chapter in a new book edited by David Howden and Joseph Salerno, The Fed at One Hundred: A Critical View on the Federal Reserve System (New York: Springer, 2014). My chapter is called “Information, Incentives, and Organization: The Microeconomics of Central Banking,” and builds upon themes discussed many times on this blog, such as Fed independence. Here is a SSRN version of the chapter. The book comes out next month but you can pre-order at the Amazon link above.
Organizations and Markets 
Recent Comments