Klein Bottle
| Lasse Lien |
Behold, below, the Klein Bottle.
It’s described in mathematical topology as a bottle with no distinct inside or outside. Just one side. Strictly speaking, it can only be constructed in four spatial dimensions, but in our three-dimensional world it might be useful for constructing witty remarks for Peter.
It’s also possible to construct a handsome Klein bottle hat, something the gentleman to the right has done. I don’t know about other O&M readers, but I am surely getting one.
Feynman on (Quantitative Empirical) Social Science
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to Teppo for the pointer. Naturally I will accuse Feynmann of confusing science and scientism. As Rothbard put it:
In our proper condemnation of scientism in the study of man, we should not make the mistake of dismissing science as well. For if we do so, we credit scientism too highly and accept at face value its claim to be the one and only scientific method. . . . Science, after all, means scientia, correct knowledge; it is older and wiser than the positivist-pragmatist attempt to monopolize the term.
Organizational Economics and International Trade
| Peter Klein |
New NBER paper from Pol Antràs and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, “Organizations and Trade” (ungated here). Surveys “an emerging literature at the intersection of organizational economics and international trade,” arguing that “a proper modelling of the organizational aspects of production provides valuable insights on the aggregate workings of the world economy.” Indeed, “certain predictions of standard models . . . are affected or even overturned when organizational decisions are brought into the analysis.”
A valuable survey, but the focus is quite narrow; an older and broader literature seeking to apply transaction cost economics to issues in international business, going back to Teece (1977), should also be consulted. (Joanne Oxley’s research page is a good place to start.)
Keep Academics Away from the Cinema
| Peter Klein |
Because they produce purple prose like this:
I have tried to show how the impossibility of a single filmic representation can serve as a refractory surface against which a series of analogies, paradigmatic shifts, and disarticulations located within distinct yet convergent planes of historical actualisation come into a view. It is in turn, across the strata of this unstable causal field (the discontinuities of which have been reconciled or reduced within the binary logic of the dominant supratext) that the reconstitution of the various ontogenetic stages of It’s All True (planning, production, dispersion) can be sketched.
This verbal assault is quoted, with appropriate mockery, by Simon Callow in the preface to volume 2 of his engrossing biography of Orson Welles, Hello Americans (2006). The reference is to Welles’s unfinished film It’s All True (about which an interesting documentary was made in 1993). Adds Callow: “The author of this remarkable passage, which, as far as I am aware, has not yet been translated into English, is a serious researcher who no doubt has much to tell us about Orson Welles, but we will never know what it is.”
CBS Microfoundations Conference: Knowledge and HRM
| Nicolai Foss |
As O&M readers may know I am the Director of Copenhagen Business School’s Center for Strategic Management and Globalization. As the name indicates we do SIM (strategic and international management), but with a twist: We are specifically interested in the governance dimensions of knowledge processes (knowledge sharing, integration, creation, etc.), and we are specifically interested in micro-foundations for the firm-level concepts that we routinely apply in strategic management and IB (see here for a more detailed characterization). These two themes come together in a conference organized next week (18-19 September) by Dr. Dana Minbaeva, “HRM, Knowledge Processes, and Organizational Performance: In Search of Micro-Foundations.” The papers are online, and many of them should be of potential interest to readers of O&M. I particularly recommend the paper by Joshua Tomsik, Todd Zenger and Teppo Felin (of orgtheory.net fame), “The Knowledge Economy: Emerging Organizational Forms, Micro-Foundations, and Key Human Resource Heuristics.”
Wiki Textbooks
| Peter Klein |
I teach two graduate courses without textbooks, Economics of Institutions and Organizations and Entrepreneurship: Theory, Applications, Debate. Maybe I should ask the students to create a Wiki Textbook? Anybody out there in the blogosphere want to coordinate such a project? (Thanks to Molly Burress for the link.)
See also previous entries on Wikisummaries, the Global Text Project, wiki notes, and Wikiversity.
Best Few Sentences I Read Today, Macroeconomics Edition
| Peter Klein |
Olivier Blanchard, writing on “The State of Macro[economics]”:
The editors of this new Journal asked me to write about “The Future of Macroeconomics.” Nobody should accept such a task. One can forecast the near future with some confidence: Research technology is largely Austrian in nature, with output following inputs later in time. One can see the various teams at work, and thus be confident that, sooner or later, they will succeed. But it is nearly impossible to forecast beyond that.
The paper is generating quite a lot of blogospheric buzz. Mark Thoma has posted a chunk for readers lacking NBER access. In case you’re wondering, no, the Austrian theory of the business cycle is not part of Blanchard’s anticipated future.
BTW I have not been able to figure out which journal this paper was written for. Does anybody know?
Call for Papers: International Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
The new Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads. (And not just because I’m the SEJ’s #1 author — it’s true, when my colleagues and I submitted this paper, we were assigned manuscript number SEJ-0001.) Here’s a call for papers for a special issue on international entrepreneurship edited by Douglas Cumming, Don Siegel, and Mike Wright. The call lists several potential research questions::
- How do government policies impact incentives to form strategic alliances among entrepreneurial firms in domestic versus foreign settings?
- What is the role of laws and public policy in stimulating transnational and returning entrepreneurs?
- What is the role of social networks in international entrepreneurship?
- What factors lead to the success of immigrant entrepreneurs in different countries?
- What is the interaction between public policy and foreign investment in entrepreneurial ventures?
- What explains international differences in governmental policies regarding intellectual property, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial finance?
- How does international entrepreneurship affect firm performance?
- How important is product and geographic focus for entrepreneurial success within different public policy settings?
- What are the implications of corporate entrepreneurship for multinational companies?
- How do corporate governance regulations impact international entrepreneurship?
- How do venture capitalists and private equity firms make decisions in an international context, including the decision to make cross-border investments and how to enter international markets?
- What is the role of academic entrepreneurship in various nations? Is their convergence or divergence in policies to stimulate academic entrepreneurship?
- How do universities stimulate international technology transfer and commercialization?
- What is the relative importance of patenting, licensing, and property-based institutions, such as science parks and incubators in stimulating entrepreneurship in various nations?
Submissions are due 31 December. Accepted papers will be presented at a conference at York University in April.
The Onion or Reality: Today’s Quiz
| Peter Klein |
Which is more ridiculous? Hard to tell.
Praising the vehicle’s 25 years of experience, its proven dependability, and its 2.2-liter internal combustion engine, Chrysler announced Monday that it has appointed a 1983 four-door LeBaron sedan as the company’s new CEO. “We believe that the LeBaron’s expertise in dealing with customers, combined with its 100.3-inch wheelbase, makes it the right automobile for the job,” Chrysler CFO Ron Kolka said. The Chrysler Town and Country, passed over for the position for the second time in four years, will return to its post as the company’s regional finance manager. When asked how Chrysler plans to shift toward more energy-efficient models in order to compete in a changing marketplace, the LeBaron honked its horn for 35 seconds.
The Big Three Detroit automakers have begun lobbying Congress for up to $50 billion in loans that would help them adjust to a market that demands more fuel-efficient vehicles. But the automakers insist the loans would not amount to a government bailout of the struggling auto industry.
How Well Does the Market Handle Network Effects?
| Peter Klein |
Quite well, according to Dan Spulber’s paper “Consumer Coordination in the Small and in the Large: Implications for Antitrust in Markets with Network Effects,” out recently in the Journal of Competition Law and Economics (June 2008). Dan distinguishes between network effects in small- and large-numbers bargaining situations; Coasean bargaining can solve the problem in the former while Hayekian “spontaneous order” can emerge in the latter. The paper also contains a useful, up-to-date summary of the network effects literature. Highly recommended!
Westgren to Missouri
| Peter Klein |
I’m delighted to announce that Randy Westgren, organizational scholar, academic entrepreneur, bon vivant, and all-around great guy — and, most important, former O&M guest blogger — has been named McQuinn Professor of Entrepreneurial Leadership at the University of Missouri. I’ve greatly enjoyed interacting with Randy over the years from his perch in Urbana-Champaign and am looking forward to having him just down the hallway.
As McQuinn Professor Randy will also direct the McQuinn Center, which was launched in 2004 under the leadership of Bruce Bullock. The Center is creating an innovative and unusual program to research and teach the “functional” aspects of entrepreneurship, with particular emphasis on firm organization and strategy and applications to food, agriculture, biotechnology, natural resources, and rural development.
Please join me in congratulating Randy on his new post!
Messin’ With Entrepreneurship Data
| Peter Klein |
OK, it’s not as much fun as Messin’ with Sasquatch. But what happens if you mess with the two leading sources of global entrepreneurship data, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which tracks startups, and the World Bank Entrepreneurship Survey dataset, which measures formal business registrations? One could explain the differences in terms of coverage, the sensitivity of the measurement instrument, and various forms of error. Or, like Zoltan Acs, Sameeksha Desai, and Leora Klapper, use the differences to measure the stages of entrepreneurial development. For commensurate data, that is, the ratio of registrations to startups provides information on the rate at which entrepreneurial ideas are transformed into feasible ventures. The abstract, from SSRN:
This paper compares two datasets designed to measure entrepreneurship. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor dataset captures early-stage entrepreneurial activity; the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey dataset captures formal business registration. There are a number of important differences when the data are compared. First, GEM data tend to report significantly greater levels of early-stage entrepreneurship in developing economies than do the World Bank data. The World Bank data tend to be greater than GEM data for developed countries. Second, the magnitude of the difference between the datasets across countries is related to the local institutional and environmental conditions for entrepreneurs, after controlling for levels of economic development. A possible explanation for this is that the World Bank data measure rates of entry in the formal economy, whereas GEM data are reflective of entrepreneurial intent and capture informality of entrepreneurship. This is particularly true for developing countries. Therefore, this discrepancy can be interpreted as the spread between individuals who could potentially operate businesses in the formal sector – and those that actually do so: In other words, GEM data may represent the potential supply of entrepreneurs, whereas the World Bank data may represent the actual rate of entrepreneurship. The findings suggest that entrepreneurs in developed countries have greater ease and incentives to incorporate, both for the benefits of greater access to formal financing and labor contracts, as well as for tax and other purposes not directly related to business activities.
The Downside of (Quasi-)Academic Blogging
| Peter Klein |
It goes like this: Blogger A, a writer or grad student or some other non-specialist commentator, takes on Big Issue X with a few glib sentences dismissing decades, or even centuries, of research by specialists on some important topic. A recent example involved a blogger, who apparently is some kind of grad student, opining on the minimum wage. The blogger quotes Kevin Murphy’s statement that economic theory predicts that a wage floor above the market-clearing wage will, ceteris paribus, reduce the demand for labor. But no, says our blogger — labor and commodities are different economic goods, so that the law of demand does not apply to the former! Well, gosh, economists have been thinking about the demand for factors of production for, I don’t know, about two hundred years, and have had a pretty sophisticated understanding of marginal productivity since the late nineteenth century. My guess is that our blogger has read a textbook or two, and maybe even a few recent journal articles on the minimum-wage controversy, but thinks this discovery that factor markets are different from commodity markets is a brilliant new insight. (Note to blogger: factor-market demand curves are also downward sloping.) If I were this blogger’s academic adviser, I would suggest that she consult a labor economist, or perhaps skim Lazear’s Personnel Economics, before writing this sort of drivel.
As they used to say about the internet: The good thing about blogging is that anyone can share his opinion with the world. The bad thing about blogging is that anyone can share his opinion with the world.
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…)
A Clever Classroom Exercise
| Peter Klein |
J. W. Verret, guest blogging at the Conglomerate:
I thought that I would talk about an exercise I conducted on my first day teaching Securities Regulation.
We ran an auction for a “gift certificate for dinner for two, plus drinks, at a local restaurant,” the proceeds of which would be donated to the American Cancer Society. I informed them, by way of a disclosure statement via email, that I informally asked some friends on the faculty what they would bid based on the same limited information that the students received. I told the students that the result of that informal survey was an average bid of $93.50, and I mentioned that if the students obtained the item for lower than its value they might even sell it for a profit. My disclosure email was riddled with the sort of dry and equivocal statements one might find in a registration statement, and my first day sales pitch was a little more puffed up.
The result: The winning bid was $85 for a $10 gift certificate to McDonald’s. I think it got their attention, which was a good intro to my overview of what we’ll cover in the class.
Who else wants to share an effective classroom experiment or exercise? (Russ Coff has also suggested some here.)
Order Yours Today!
| Peter Klein |
It’s great having graduate students with a sense of humor (and a knowledge of German):
Now, if only they would spend as much time on their dissertations as they spend on their jokes. . . .
Hoselitz’s “Early History of Entrepreneurial Theory”
| Peter Klein |
Thanks to my dedicated assistants Per Bylund and Mario Mondelli we now have an electronic copy of Bert Hoselitz’s hard-to-find 1951 essay, “The Early History of Entrepreneurial Theory” (Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, volme 3, pp. 193-220) and are happy to share it. This is one of the best surveys of the concept of entrepreneurship in pre-classical economics (but also including J. B. Say). (Hébert and Link (1988) think Hoselitz draws too sharp a line between Cantillon and Say.)
Something Useful for the Weekend
| Lasse Lien |
Maybe you’re going to a dinner party this weekend, and maybe you’re worrying that the conversation with the person (of the opposite sex) seated next to you is going to dry up. If so, O&M offers a solution. Read the paper whose abstract appears below beforehand, and just as conversation is starting to cool down, give a quick summary of it. That should bring the heat back up.
We examine why developed societies are monogamous while rich men throughout history have typically practiced polygyny. Wealth inequality naturally produces multiple wives for rich men in a standard model of the marriage market. However, we demonstrate that higher female inequality in the marriage market reduces polygyny. Moreover, we show that female inequality increases in the process of development as women are valued more for the quality of their children than for the quantity. Consequently, male inequality generates inequality in the number of wives per man in traditional societies, but manifests itself as inequality in the quality of wives in developed societies.
Another potential use of the paper is to give it to your spouse if he or she complaints too much. I.e. make the point that if you are low quality, then he or she is likely to be low quality too, so he or she would be better off praising you.
The full reference is: Gould, Eric D., Omer Moav, and Avi Simhon. 2008. “The Mystery of Monogamy,” American Economic Review, 98(1): 333–57. The paper can be found here.
Influence of E. A. G. Robinson on Coase
| Peter Klein |
The March 2008 issue of the Journal of the History of Economic Thought features “On Robinson, Coase, and ‘The Nature of the Firm'” by Lowell Jacobsen. Robinson is E. A. G. Robinson, the Cambridge economist and longtime editor of the Economic Journal, now known mainly as the husband of Joan Robinson. Coase was trained by Arnold Plant and has written much about Plant’s influence. Jacobsen argues that Coase was also influenced significantly by Robinson, an influence that has not been widely appreciated. Here’s a bit from the conclusion:
Robinson’s influence on Coase’s writing of ‘‘The Nature of the Firm’’ through his The Structure of Competitive Industry is both obvious and significant. This is understandable, as Robinson and Coase both embraced and looked to extend the Marshallian tradition with these noted works.19 They sought to directly engage the real world of business as they were keenly interested in how firms actually behave, and why. They pursued answers to very fundamental questions: Why do firms exist? and, To what size? In addition, the study of firms and their industries requires a variety of considerations if effective decision-making by the firms’ managers is to be properly understood. In Cairncross’ fine biography of Robinson, he noted the brilliance of Robinson was his ability ‘‘to look at problems from different angles, against an historical background, taking in technology, organisational considerations, political feasibility’’ (Cairncross 1993, p. 164). Much the same could be said about Coase. . . .
[Robinson and Coase] were both interested in applying simple, yet compelling, economic concepts and theory such as scale economies, substitution at the margin and, of course, transaction costs. Further, it was important for them that economic analysis be grounded on realistic assumptions; theory that depended on fabricated assumptions to ensure tractability and even elegance should be largely avoided. Moreover, mathematics should not be the sine qua non of economic theory. Unfortunately, formalism and a priori theorizing emerged in the 1930s (given such influences as Robbins, Pigou, and even Joan Robinson) to dominate, if not define, mainstream economics, including the treatment of the firm. As a result, Coase and Robinson arguably became ‘‘outsiders’’ as Medema (1994), in his equally fine biography, concludes about Coase.
The paper is free, for now at least, on the Cambridge Journals site, so grab it while you can.
Barry Smith Online
| Peter Klein |
I just learned that Barry Smith’s influential book, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Open Court, 1994), is available online in its entirety. This is not a book on the Vienna School or logical positivism or Wittgenstein, but on the general philosophical climate in Austria during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with special emphasis on the influence of this climate on Carl Menger’s economics. Menger, Smith has argued, was steeped in the Catholic, Aristotelian tradition of classical Austrian philosophy and this helps explain how his “causal-realist” approach differs from its Walrasian and Jevonsian counterparts.
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