Coase on the Economists
| Peter Klein |
Ronald Coase has a short piece in the December 2012 Harvard Business Review, “Saving Economics from the Economists” (thanks to Geoff Manne for the tip). Not bad for a fellow about to turn 102! I always learn from Coase, even when I don’t fully agree. Here Coase decries the irrelevance of contemporary economic theory, condemning economics for “giving up the real-world economy as its subject matter.” He also provides a killer quote: “Economics thus becomes a convenient instrument the state uses to manage the economy, rather than a tool the public turns to for enlightenment about how the economy operates.”
I’m sure that’s true for many economists and for some branches of the field, such as Keynesian macroeconomics. But Coase seems to reject economic theorizing altogether, even the “causal-realist” approach popular in these parts. To be useful, he argues, economics should provide practical guidance for the businessperson. However, “[s]ince economics offers little in the way of practical insight, managers and entrepreneurs depend on their own business acumen, personal judgment, and rules of thumb in making decisions.”
Well, that sounds about right to me. Economics provides general principles, or laws, about human action and interaction, mostly stated as “if-then” propositions. Applying the principles to concrete, historical cases requires Verstehen, and is the task of economic historians (as analysts) and entrepreneurs (as actors), not economic theorists. Deductive theory does not replace judgment. Without deductive theory, however, we’d have no principles to apply, and nothing to contribute to our understanding of the economy except — to quote Coase’s own critique of the Old Institutionalists — “a mass of descriptive material waiting for a theory, or a fire.” To be sure, Coase’s own inductive method has led to several brilliant insights. Coase himself has a knack for intuiting general principles from concrete cases (e.g., theorizing about transaction costs from observing automobile plants, or about property rights from studying the history of spectrum allocation), though not perfectly. But, as I noted before, Coase himself is probably the exception that proves the rule — namely that induction is a mess.
Micro-foundations All Over the Place …
| Nicolai Foss |
In a SOapBox Essay in 2005, Teppo Felin and I called for “micro-foundations” for macro management theory, specifically the dominant routines and capabilities (etc.) stream in strategic management. (check Teppo’s site for the paper, commentaries by Jay Barney and Bruce Kogut, and various other Felin & Foss papers on the subject). We thought our argument was fairly simple, not really that novel (economists have been talking about micro-foundations for decades), and “obviously true.” Yet, the argument was apparently provocative (or, perhaps more correctly, our formulation of it was…), and it met with considerable hostility. For example, the DRUID 2008 conference in Copenhagen featured a panel on micro-foundations with opposing sides represented by Sidney Winter and Thorbjørn Knudsen, and Peter Abell and yours truly, respectively. I remember seeing several (extremely) prominent management scholars shaking their heads in disbelief about the folly of micro-foundations. (The debate, though not the head-shaking, can be accessed through the DRUID site).
And yet, 7 years later the micro-foundations project appears to have met with general acceptance, although it is sometimes referred to as the “Foss Fuss,” by at least one very prominent contributor to our field. In fact, some of the head-shaking persons from DRUID 2008 now themselves talk about micro-foundations. Both Sid Winter and Thorbjørn Knudsen (not headshakers) now embrace micro-foundations–albeit of the “right” kind (e.g., behavioralist and informed by neuroscience and experiments). Papers in leading journals have “micro-foundations” in the title. Specific examples: :
- The Journal of Management Studies just published a special issue on “Micro-origins of Routines and Capabilities,” edited by Teppo, me, Koen Heimeriks, and Tammy Madsen, and featuring contributions by various luminaries.
- The European Management Review’s December issue (not yet online) will feature a transcribed exchange between Sid Winter, me and Maurizio Zollo on micro-foundations.
- A leading association in our field will adopt “micro-foundations” as the theme of one its conferences (to be held in 2014). Details to be disclosed (soon).
Micro-foundations are “everywhere.” List der Vernunft, I reckon.
UPDATE: The Academy of Management Perspectives will feature a paper symposium next year on micro-foundations. Contributors: Jay Barney, Teppo Felin, Henrich Greve, Siegwart Lindenberg, Andrew van de Ven, Sid Winter, and me.
More Genghis Revisionism
| Peter Klein |
You’ve probably heard the expression, “X is so extreme, he’s to the Right of Genghis Khan.” This basically means, “I don’t like X but have nothing intelligent to say about X or his ideas.” Mostly because we don’t know much about Genghis Khan, and what we do know presents a pretty complex picture. I mentioned before Jack Weatherford’s revisionist portrayal of the Great Khan as a somewhat progressive ruler, by the standards of his time. Now I learn, from Joe Salerno, about a paper by Andrius Valevicius “arguing that Genghis Khan’s successful empire building lay in his introduction of low taxes, stamping out of torture, and promotion of religious toleration and diversity and free scholarly inquiry in the conquered territories. The Great Khan also restricted his plundering to the wealth and property of the vanquished ruling elites while leaving their subjects generally unmolested in their persons and property and even distributing some of the plunder among them.”
Pomo Periscope XXIII: Becker on Foucault on Becker
| Nicolai Foss |
Given the importance they usually ascribe to the sinister forces of “neo-liberalism,” it is — perhaps– surprising that prominent pomo writers seldom engage with the major economists with more or less strong classical liberal/libertarian leanings, such as Nobel Prize Winners Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, and Friedrich Hayek. However, most of these write very clearly; for example, it is hard to imagine a stronger contrast to the murky prose of pomo than Nobelist Gary Becker’s refreshingly direct and clear writing.
And yet, pomo demi-god and arguably the clearest writer among the pomo social critics and philosophers, Michel Foucault critically dealt with Gary Becker in his 1979 “Birth of Biopolitics” lectures. In a recent UChicago WP, “Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Becker’: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 ‘Birth of Biopolitics’ Lectures,” Foucault’s assistant at the time of these lectures, Francois Ewald, debate Foucault’s Becker-reading with Bernard Harcourt, and–the scoop of this transcribed dialogue–Becker himself.
The whole debate is (unlike the Pomo Periscope) highly civilized; in fact, Becker notes that “I was very happy to read these two lectures, which impressed me in a number of directions. They are very clear, I thought. He had a good understanding of what human capital consisted of.” However, in spite of his politeness Becker offers a direct refutation of the Foucauldian critique that economics in general, and human capital theory in particular, dehumanize people and portray them stimulus-response puppets:
Instead of saying that the vision of man is poor, I would say the vision of man is rich in this approach, because you enrich both what people do as consumers—that’s why I think Foucault says this was an interesting theory of consumption—and you enrich what they do in terms of a lot of their other life decisions that would go beyond consumption, in terms of their education, how they might invest to respond to different government laws, how they might evade bad laws.
A fun read!! HT to Henrik Lando.
Don’t Fear the Reaper
| Peter Klein |
An important contribution to the history of technology and the relationship between technology, organization, and strategy:
Gordon Winder’s The American Reaper is a solid and significant contribution to the history of American grain harvesting implements. Winder offers several revisionist challenges to standard accounts, both those that have treated Cyrus McCormick as a heroic inventor, as well as those that have touted the International Harvester Corporation (IHC, formed in 1902) as a path-breaking model of a vertically integrated and internationally dominant firm. . . . Reaper manufacturers forged licensing agreements, subcontracted with suppliers and branch factories, shared expert personnel and innovations, hired widely dispersed sales agents, and formed alliances to protect patent advantages in order to remain competitive.
Read the rest of the EH.Net review here.
A Response to Reviewer 3
| Peter Klein |
Via Christos Kolympiris, a useful model for dealing with Reviewer 3 — and responding to journal editors and referees more generally. Sample:
We hope you will be pleased with this revision and will ®nally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process, and to express our appreciation for your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to this journal.
Tom McCraw
| Dick Langlois |
I was saddened to hear today of the passing of Tom McCraw at the young age of 72. I didn’t always agree with him: he was a strong admirer of the Progressives, and even tried implausibly to suggest in Prophet of Innovation, his great biography of Schumpeter, that Schumpeter would have agreed with Progressive policies had he been alive today. But McCraw was a gentleman, a fine writer, and an important figure in business history. Prophet of Innovation is a terrific book. I wish I had written it.
Remembering the Ostroms
| Peter Klein |
Indiana University’s Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis has a memorial section for the Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, both of whom passed away this year. Here’s my colleague David O’Brien:
I was a graduate student in Sociology at Indiana University in the late 1960s when I was looking for some courses in Political Science to fulfill the requirements for a minor. I had signed up for a course but the professor left for another university and somehow, by default, I took Lin’s course on “Political Calculus.” Like so many others in my discipline at the time I saw the world from a zero-sum conflict perspective. At the beginning of the semester I felt like I was in intermediate Chinese and had not taken the basic course. Riker’s Theory of Political Coalitions and Buchanan and Tullock’s Calculus of Consent were among the many readings that baffled me. What I remember most about Lin’s teaching was her enthusiasm and the fun she was having in doing her work. There were a lot of serious, somewhat dour, professors around in the late 1960s and not many women in teaching positions in the social sciences. So Lin stood out by her demeanor as well as her intellectual gifts. She had genuine concern for other human beings, including someone like me who did not have a clue as to what was going on and she persistently nudged me to keep an open mind about how I would approach the world as a social scientist. She did something very unusual in those days, which was to suggest that the boundaries between disciplines were artificial.
I did not fully appreciate Lin Ostrom’s influence on my scholarly life until many years after I left IU. Her encouragement to look beyond the disciplinary walls led me to use Mancur Olson’s Logic of Collective Action, one of the books assisgned in the Political Calculus course, as the theoretical foundation of my first work on urban neighborhood organization. Her encouragement for working across disciplines encouraged me to work in partnership with psychologists, political scientists and economists on a variety of research projects find a comfortable home in a Division of Applied Social Sciences.
I thoroughly enjoyed my conversations with Vincent, who became a member of my dissertation committee. He helped me to understand how collective action challenges that we face in our day are analytically similar to those faced centuries ago. I am especially grateful to Vincent for introducing me to the importance of constitutions and federalism, but also to Tocqueville’s observations of the relationship between “association” and “habits of the heart.” Vincent’s insightful observations on the complex relationships between formal and informal institutions have had a significant impact on my approach to household and village adaptations to post-command economy transitions in the former Soviet Union and East Africa.
Most important, Lin and Vincent led by example. They were genuinely kind human beings who were always willing to listen to others and encourage them, engage in spirited debate and thoroughly enjoyed doing applied scholarship.
Romney and Rent-Seeking
| Peter Klein |
I teased Obama for his “you didn’t build that” gaffe, so it’s only fair that I say something about Romney’s infamous “47%” remark. A friend of mine says that rather than pick on Romney we should “address the very real concern that liberals are using the ‘safety net’ to create a majority underclass that makes our whole system and political class impervious to change or criticism.”
I too was puzzled by the outrage over Romney’s gaffe; wasn’t he just expressing the median voter theorem? But there’s a more substantive point here. My friend is right about welfare bums, just not exactly in the way he thinks. It’s true that many Americans are drinking deeply from the public trough and will resist any attempts at fundamental entitlement reform. These are not the urban poor, however, but the government-connected firms, professionals, bureaucrats, and other rent-seekers who enjoy special privilege at the expense of the rest of us. Try to get US manufacturers to support free trade, farmers to give up crop subsidies, defense contractors to end foreign wars, doctors to relax licensing restrictions, and so on. How many commercial bankers are lining up behind Ron Paul’s call to abolish the Federal Reserve System and subject banks to real competition? Are ADM, Cargill, and Bunge lobbying to reduce taxpayer expenditures on foreign aid? Come to think of it, how many professors at US public universities want to cut subsidies for higher education? (“Hey, don’t touch my research budget, bro!”)
Mencken famously quipped that “every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.” Indeed, given the magnitude of the rents, we should perhaps be surprised that rent-seekers aren’t fighting even harder for a piece of the action.
The Dissertation Defense
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to Pete Boettke for forwarding this thoughtful CHE piece on the dissertation defense. Like the writer, I never had a defense; I was exchanging dissertation drafts with my adviser (via snail mail — this was a long time ago), and one day he simply said, “Send me the title page,” and I was done.
Having participated as a professor in many defenses, both for my own students and for others at home and abroad, I not only appreciate the value of the defense, but recognize the substantial differences in defense formats around the world (fairly casual in the US, much more formal and ceremonial in Europe). I remember touring the University of Salamanca a few years ago and learning how defenses were conducted in the 15th and 16th centuries — multi-day events filled with huge parties and strange rituals, including the candidate spending the night before locked in a room and being stepped on by faculty and other students.
My favorite format is depicted in a 1987 New Yorker cartoon:
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.
Capabilities and Organizational Economics: How Do They Relate?
| Nicolai Foss |
From the official SMG blog, Strategy and Organization:
A long-standing discussion in management research concerns the relation between capabilities perspectives on the firm and organizational economics, including transaction cost economics and agency theory. In particular, proponents of capabilities ideas have criticized organizational economics for exaggerating the role of opportunism (and similar constructs), neglecting value creation and downplaying dynamics. Conversely, proponents of organizational economics have criticized the lack of a clear unit of analysis, causal mechanisms and micro-foundations in the capabilities approach.
“While these early debates clarified many things,” says SMG Professor Nicolai J Foss, “the field is increasingly moving towards a more conciliatory stance in which the two perspectives are seen as capable of cross-fertilizing each other. This is going further than merely stressing a relation of complementarity in which capabilities ideas lend themselves to the explanation of organizational heterogeneity while organizational economics provides the understanding of the organization of heterogeneous resources and capabilities. The new view is that, notably, organizational economics has the potential of illuminating capability emergence and therefore organizational heterogeneity.”
With Nicholas Argyres (Washington University), Teppo Felin (Brigham Young University), and Todd Zenger (Washington University) Foss is an editor of the September-October issue of the leading management research journal, Organization Science, titled “Organizational Economics and Capabilities: From Opposition and Complementarity to Real Integration” (http://orgsci.journal.informs.org/content/23/5.toc). This special issue contains a number of articles by leading contributors to the discussion, and mixes theoretical, empirical and modeling approaches, as well as an introduction by the editors that survey the debate and defines a new agenda for research in the field.
“We are pleased that we got so many high-level contributions for this special issue,” says Foss, “and in particular that these contributions truly manage to define a new, creative research frontier where the emphasis is on researching the interplay between theoretical mechanisms identified by the two perspectives.
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
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