Posts filed under ‘Syllabus Exchange’
Popular Economics Readings
| Peter Klein |
The Open Syllabus Project is a useful repository of course reading lists from almost every academic discipline. (Hey, we had the idea first!) A fun feature is the ability to browse by popularity, i.e., to see the most frequently assigned readings in a particular field. Of course, the sample consists of syllabi posted on public websites, so it may be biased toward particular kinds of courses or universities. Still, the findings are interesting. This article complains that The Communist Manifesto is near the top across all disciplines, but confusingly bounces back and forth between economics and other fields and doesn’t distinguish among textbooks, research monographs, and research articles.
I made my own list of most popular items under Economics, excluding textbooks and other non-research materials. The results are interesting:
- Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost”
- Smith, The Wealth of Nations
- Keyness, The General Theory
- Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”
- Marx, Capital
- Pritchett, “Divergence, Big Time”
- Coase, “The Nature of the Firm”
- Tiebout, “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures”
- Akerlof, “The Market for Lemons”
- Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”
- North, Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance
- Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
- Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents
- Friedman, “Monetary Policy”
- Solow, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth”
- David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”
- Spence, “Job Market Signaling”
- Marx, Communist Manifesto
- Dornbusch, “Expectations and Exchange Rate Dynamics”
- Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth
- Friedman, “The Role of Monetary Policy”
- Grossman and Helpman, “Protection for Sale”
- Diamond, “Social Security”
- Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990”
- Stigler, “The Theory of Economic Regulation”
- Freeman, “Are Your Wages Set in China?”
- Duflo, “Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of School Construction in Indonesia”
- Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Effects of Medical Care”
- Rogoff, “The Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle”
- Barro, “Are Government Bonds Net Worth?”
Pretty much all classics, and not surprising to see any on a reading list. But some surprising omissions. No Samuelson, Becker, Lucas, Krugman, Sargent, Kahneman, or Fama, just to mention a few Nobelists. No Shleifer, Tirole, Mankiw, Holmstrom, Simon, Jensen, Kreps, Alchian, Demsetz, and others with highly cited SSCI or RePEC papers. Of course, these are undergraduate as well as graduate syllabi, so highly technical articles assigned to PhD students are less likely to make the cut. Still, this might be a good “Books and Articles Every Economist Should Know” kind of list.
PhD Strategy Syllabi
| Peter Klein |
Russ Coff has assembled an impressive list of syllabi and reading lists for PhD courses in strategy, innovation, research methods, and related subjects. Feel free to send him additional suggestions. Many useful references here for faculty and students teaching or taking these courses, and for anybody wishing to learn more about classic and contemporary literature in strategic management research.
The Myth of the Flattening Hierarchy
| Peter Klein |
We’ve written many posts on the popular belief that information technology, globalization, deregulation, and the like have rendered the corporate hierarchy obsolete, or at least led to a substantial “flattening” of the modern corporation (see the links here). The theory is all wrong — these environmental changes affect the costs of both internal and external governance, and the net effect on firm size and structure are ambiguous — and the data don’t support a general trend toward smaller and flatter firms.
Julie Wulf has a paper in the Fall 2012 California Management Review summarizing her careful and detailed empirical work on the shape of corporate hierarchies. (The published version is paywalled, but here is a free version.) Writes Julie:
I set out to investigate the flattening phenomenon using a variety of methods, including quantitative analysis of large datasets and more qualitative research in the field involving executive interviews and a survey on executive time use. . . .
We discovered that flattening has occurred, but it is not what it is widely assumed to be. In line with the conventional view of flattening, we find that CEOs eliminated layers in the management ranks, broadened their spans of control, and changed pay structures in ways suggesting some decisions were in fact delegated to lower levels. But, using multiple methods of analysis, we find other evidence sharply at odds with the prevailing view of flattening. In fact, flattened firms exhibited more control and decision-making at the top. Not only did CEOs centralize more functions, such that a greater number of functional managers (e.g., CFO, Chief Human Resource Officer, CIO) reported directly to them; firms also paid lower-level division managers less when functional managers joined the top team, suggesting more decisions at the top. Furthermore, CEOs report in interviews that they flattened to “get closer to the businesses” and become more involved, not less, in internal operations. Finally, our analysis of CEO time use indicates that CEOs of flattened firms allocate more time to internal interactions. Taken together, the evidence suggests that flattening transferred some decision rights from lower-level division managers to functional managers at the top. And flattening is associated with increased CEO involvement with direct reports —the second level of top management—suggesting a more hands-on CEO at the pinnacle of the hierarchy.
As they say, read the whole thing.
The Institutional Revolution
| Peter Klein |
I’m very excited about Doug Allen’s forthcoming book The Institutional Revolution (University of Chicago Press). Trained by Yoram Barzel (and hence part of the Tree of Zvi), Doug is a leading contemporary scholar on property rights, transaction costs, contracting, and economic history. His work on agricultural contracting with Dean Lueck, including their 2002 book The Nature of the Farm, is a classic contribution to the economics literature on economic organization. He also has a very good introductory textbook. More information is at Doug’s informative (and amusing) website.
Here’s the cover blurb for the new book:
Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world—with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions.
In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account of another, quieter revolution that took place at the end of the eighteenth century and allowed for the full exploitation of the many new technological innovations. Fundamental to this shift were dramatic changes in institutions, or the rules that govern society, which reflected significant improvements in the ability to measure performance—whether of government officials, laborers, or naval officers—thereby reducing the role of nature and the hazards of variance in daily affairs. Along the way, Allen provides readers with a fascinating explanation of the critical roles played by seemingly bizarre institutions, from dueling to the purchase of one’s rank in the British Army.
Engagingly written, The Institutional Revolution traces the dramatic shift from premodern institutions based on patronage, purchase, and personal ties toward modern institutions based on standardization, merit, and wage labor—a shift which was crucial to the explosive economic growth of the Industrial Revolution.
Bonus: Here’s the syllabus from Doug’s course on the economics of property rights.
Short Course on Network Economics
| Peter Klein |
I’m teaching a five-week, online course starting in January called “Networks and the Digital Revolution: Economic Myths and Realities.” It’s offered through the Mises Academy, an innovative course-delivery platform that is becoming its own educational ecosystem. A description and course outline is here, signup information is here. I’d love to have you join me!
Tilburg Conference on Private Ordering
| Scott Masten |
O&M readers might be interested in a conference held this week (Sept. 30 – Oct. 1) at the Tilburg Law and Economics Center on the topic “Economic Governance and Competition: The Pros and Cons of Private Ordering in the Shadow of the Law.” The conference was organized by Jens Prüfer and featured keynote presentations by Lisa Bernstein, Avinash Dixit, Robert Gibbons, and Bentley MacLeod. Many interesting papers, several of the authors of which will be familiar to the O&M/ISNIE crowd. The full program, including downloadable papers, can be found here. (Would have liked to attended but classes interfered.)
Chris Coyne’s Austrian Course
| Peter Klein |
Earlier I shared the reading list for my graduate course in the Austrian school of economics. Chris Coyne is teaching a similar class and has posted his syllabus here. Chris’s course is laid out differently than mine, with a different mix among types of readings, but I like what he’s done. As Pete Boettke and Joe Salerno have noted, the diversity and variety of course offerings and educational programs in Austrian economics is a sign of the health and vitality of the school.
How to Read an Academic Article
| Peter Klein |
This fall I’m teaching “Economics of Institutions and Organizations” to first-year graduate students. The reading list is rather heavy, compared to what most students are used to from their undergraduate courses and their first-year courses in microeconomics, econometrics, etc. I explain that they need to become not only avid readers, but also efficient readers, able to extract the maximum information from an academic article with the least effort. They need to learn, in other words, the art of the skim.
When I’ve explained this in the past, students have responded that they don’t know how to skim. So a couple years back I put together a little handout, “How to Read an Academic Article,” with a few tips and tricks. I emphasize that I don’t mean to be patronizing, and that they should ignore the handout if its contents seem painfully obvious. But students have told me they really appreciate having this information. So, I reproduce the handout below. Any comments and suggestions for improvement?
How to Read an Academic Article
- Caveat: no single style works for everyone!
- Klein’s basic steps for skimming, scanning, processing…
- Read the abstract (if provided)
- Read the introduction.
- Read the conclusion.
- Skim the middle, looking at section titles, tables, figures, etc.—try to get a feel for the style and flow of the article.
- Is it methodological, conceptual, theoretical (verbal or mathematical), empirical, or something else?
- Is it primarily a survey, a novel theoretical contribution, an empirical application of an existing theory or technique, a critique, or something else?
- Go back and read the whole thing quickly, skipping equations, most figures and tables.
- Go back and read the whole thing carefully, focusing on the sections or areas that seem most important.
- Once you’ve grasped the basic argument the author is trying to make, critique it!
- Ask if the argument makes sense. Is it internally consistent? Well supported by argument or evidence? (This skill takes some experience to develop!)
- Compare the article to others you’ve read on the same or a closely related subject. (If this is the first paper you’ve read in a particular subject area, find some more and skim them. Introductions and conclusions are key.) Compare and contrast. Are the arguments consistent, contradictory, orthogonal?
- Use Google Scholar, the Social Sciences Citation Index, publisher web pages, and other resources to find articles that cite the article you’re reading. See what they say about it. See if it’s mentioned on blogs, groups, etc.
- Check out a reference work, e.g. a survey article from the Journal of Economic Literature, a Handbook or Encyclopedia article, or a similar source, to see how this article fits in the broader context of its subject area.
Austrian Economics PhD Course
| Peter Klein |
This semester I am teaching a PhD course in the Austrian school of economics. Here’s a preview. Visitors to Columbia, Missouri are welcome to sit in!
Excerpt from the syllabus:
It is difficult to cover an entire school of thought in one semester. Austrian economics, after all, is not an applied field like development economics or international trade policy or biotechnology but an alternative approach to all fields of economics. The course objective is not to provide a comprehensive review and critique of the entire Austrian tradition, but to give students a sampler of high-quality Austrian writings, classic and modern, on a variety of issues and topics. One goal is to show that while Austrian economists share a common conceptual framework, theoretical core, and historical context, the Austrian literature contains tremendous variety, both stylistic and substantive. Like any living, breathing tradition the Austrian literature continues to expand and diversify, often at a dizzying pace.
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Mizzou Seminar on Evolutionary Models in Economics and Organization Theory
| Peter Klein |
Thanks largely to the organizing efforts of my colleague and former O&M guest blogger Randy Westgren, a group here at Missouri is examining evolutionary models in economics and organization theory. The centerpiece is a philosophy of science seminar directed by André Ariew, a leading American scholar in the philosophy of biology, especially Darwin and evolutionary theory.
I’ll let Randy explain:
The course is PHL 9830. Normally it is a traditional philosophy of science seminar aimed at graduate students in the department of philosophy, but we hijacked it to examine a specific theme. The subject focus is evolutionary theory applied to biology, economics, and management. There are three general types of questions we ask, (a) clarification, (b) conceptual, and (c) general philosophy of science. (more…)
Opening Lines I Wish I’d Written
| Peter Klein |
Last week was tough for Shakespeare scholars who wear tweed jackets with leather elbow patches and sip sherry in the faculty lounge. You know, the people otherwise known as Saab drivers.
That’s from a Friday WSJ piece on GM’s attempt to dump its Saab subsidiary. Readers outside the US may not get the joke. Trust me, it’s funny.
The article is actually pretty interesting, an illustration of Williamson’s “impossibility-of-selective-intervention” thesis. “The Saab saga also demonstrates how hard it is for a boutique company to retain its special appeal after being bought by a corporate goliath. GM did make some good Saabs over the years (the midsize 9-5 model of a decade ago was one), but they didn’t seem as special as the pre-GM Saabs, even though the key stayed in the floor.” Maybe, but it isn’t obvious why the mismanagement of the Saab brand (in the US) was GM’s fault, rather than that of Saab’s division heads. Saab may have tanked anyway. Anyway, I did learn a good line from Sir John Egan, the last independent CEO of Jaguar before its acquisition by Ford, that I’ll use the next time I’m teaching about selective intervention: “When an elephant gets in bed with a mouse, the mouse gets killed and the elephant doesn’t have much fun.” Oh, and the article ends well too: “As for those sherry-sipping profs, maybe they should consider buying Chevy Silverado pickups with all the trimmings: Mars lights, gun racks and monster-truck tires. Iconoclasm can take different forms, and the talk in the faculty lounge will never be the same.”
Bonus: That same issue of the Journal also contained a strange piece by John Cassidy praising Pigou, on the grounds that Pigou’s analysis of externalities gives us unique insight into the financial crisis. “Thus, for example, a blow-up in a relatively obscure part of the credit markets—the subprime mortgage industry—can undermine the entire banking system, which, in turn, can drag the entire economy into a recession, as banks refuse to lend.” Um, duh. “Externalities” are ubiquitous, and the idea of the general interdependence of markets has been discussed since, well, Bastiat, if not the Scholastics. Certainly Pigou didn’t offer any special insight into the interdependencies across financial markets or between financial markets and product markets. Writes Cassidy: “Economics textbooks have long contained sections on how free markets fail to deal with negative spillovers such as pollution, traffic congestion and the like. Since August 2007, however, we have learned that negative spillovers occur in other sectors of the economy, especially banking.” Since August 2007? Gee, before that, we all thought banking was an isolated sector of the economy with no connection to anything.
Williamson’s “Economics of Institutions” Syllabus
| Peter Klein |
I was pretty clueless when I started graduate school. I had good undergraduate training in economics, and had the privilege of attending my first Austrian seminar, where I met Murray Rothbard, Hans Hoppe, Roger Garrison, and David Gordon, before beginning graduate work. But I really didn’t know exactly what I wanted to study. Like most economics PhD students, I wasn’t exactly turned on by the core theory and econometrics classes. Then I took Williamson’s course ECON 224, “Economics of Institutions,” and it was a revelation. The syllabus dazzled me, with readings from Coase, Simon, Hayek, North, Arrow, Chandler, Alchian, Demsetz, Ben Klein, and many other brilliant and thoughtful economists, along with sociologists, political scientists, historians, and others. I decided then that institutions and organizations would be my area, and I’ve never looked back.
Since Monday I’ve been digging through my files trying to find a copy of that syllabus. I found my folder for that course, containing notes, readings, and exams (no, you can’t see my test scores), but for some reason the syllabus has disappeared. I must have taken it out to study, perhaps when designing my own course in institutions and organizations, and it didn’t make its way back into the file. But I did find an older copy, the Fall 1988 edition. That was, I believe, Williamson’s first year at Berkeley, after arriving from Yale (where he didn’t teach PhD courses, his main appointment being in the law school). I took the course in 1989, but the syllabi are very similar. So here it is. Note the range of authors, journals, subject areas. Not at all like the typical economics PhD course!
Need Examples of Subversive Behavior in M&A
| Russ Coff |
I just finished teaching a simulation exercise to BBA students on the politics of post-acquisition integration. I was surprised that students had a great deal of trouble believing that managers would be subversive even in that kind of setting. If there are specific examples of such subversive behavior that you know about, I’d appreciate it if you would post here or email them to me.
Here are some details about the exercise (and a Dilbert cartoon) in case anyone is interested. (more…)
Reading List for My Entrepreneurship Course
| Peter Klein |
This semester I’m teaching a new PhD seminar, “Economics of Entrepreneurship: Theory, Applications, Debate.” Here’s an excerpt from the course description. The reading list is below the fold. Comments and suggestions are welcome.
Entrepreneurship is one of the fastest-growing fields within economics, management, organization theory, finance, and even law. Surprisingly, however, while the entrepreneur is fundamentally an economic agent — the “driving force of the market,” in Mises’s (1949, p. 249) phrase — modern theories of economic organization and strategy maintain an ambivalent relationship with entrepreneurship. It is widely recognized that entrepreneurship is somehow important, but there is little consensus about how the entrepreneurial role should be modeled and incorporated into economics and strategy. Indeed, the most important works in the economic literature on entrepreneurship — Schumpeter’s account of innovation, Knight’s theory of profit, and Kirzner’s analysis of entrepreneurial discovery — are viewed as interesting, but idiosyncratic insights that do not easily generalize to other contexts and problems. . . .
This course presents a wide-ranging overview of the place of entrepreneurship in economic theory, with a special focus on applications to institutions, organizations, strategy, economic development, and related fields. It is intended for PhD students trained in economics, sociology, business administration, or a similar field (subject to instructor permission). Students are expected to be in at least their second year of their PhD program and to be working on a dissertation, or looking for a suitable dissertation topic. This is a research-oriented class in which students take an active role identifying suitable articles and topics for analysis, leading course discussions, and evaluating themselves and their peers. (more…)
Syllabus Exchange III
| Peter Klein |
Four syllabi for PhD courses on organization theory:
- Andrew Van de Ven’s Macro-Organization Behavior (Minnesota)
- Tim Pollock’s Organization Theory (Penn State)
- Mikko Ketokivi, Juha-Antti Lamberg, and Saku Mantere’s Advanced Organization Theory (Helsinki University of Technology)
- Teppo Felin’s Microfoundations of Strategic Organization (BYU and Helsinki University of Technology)
Thanks to Teppo for all four links.
Syllabus Exchange II
| Peter Klein |
More material for our syllabus exchange:
- Steve Bainbridge’s Business Organizations (UCLA)
- Dick Langlois’s Economics of Organization and Controversial Social Issues (Connecticut)
- Anne Miner’s Entrepreneurship Theory and Research (Wisconsin)
- Peter Lewin’s Social and Political Environment of Business (UT-Dallas)
If you have a syllabus to share, let us know.
Syllabus Exchange
| Peter Klein |
As a new semester begins professor-bloggers are sharing their notes and class syllabi. We previously mentioned Thom Lambert’s opening lecture in his Business Organizations class. Here are some syllabi that might interest O&M readers:
- Kieran Healy’s Economic Sociology (Arizona)
- Teppo Felin’s Microfoundations of Strategic Organization (BYU)
- Pete Boettke’s Austrian Theory of the Market Process II (George Mason)
- Cory Doctorow’s Is Everyone on this Campus a Copyright Criminal? (USC)
- Henry Farrell’s Institutions and Politics (George Washington)
Organizations and Markets 
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