Interesting Posts

...from Organizations and Markets by Peter Klein. (see here and here)

Jeremy Siegel on Wall Street's High-profile Victim

Last week, Wharton Finance professor Jeremy Siegel, author of The Future for Investors, discussed Bear Stearns, inflation pressure and Fed's efforts to boost investors' confidence with Knowldge@Wharton.

Incomplete contract and international trade

Peter Klein has the post. For earlier contributions to international trade theory through the lens of incomplete contracting, see here, here and here.

Steven Cheung is coming

From April 14 to 25, Steven Cheung (here for his blog, in Chinese), a major contributor to the "classical property rights theory" (as opposed to the new property rights theory pioneered by Grossman, Hart and Moore) is going to give us a series of lectures in our university on his economic thoughts.

He will cover two major topics in his recent book (volume I, II, III. Unfortunately, also in Chinese) -- the Law of Demand and the Change of Economic Constraints (i.e., property rights, transaction costs, etc.)

Bloomberg Radio Last Week

...featured eight Nobel Laureates: Becker, Spence, Solow, Fogel, Phelps, Sen, Samuelson, and Schelling.

Top Business School Research Rankings

The University of Texas at Dallas's School of Management has just launched a newer version of their UTD Top 100 Business School Research Rankings.

They have created a database to track publications in 24 leading business journals (here for the list). The database contains titles and author affiliations of papers published in these journals since 1990.

In this version, you can customize your search by any journal or combination of journals (maybe in your own field) between the time period 1990 to date to get a ranking of schools, and you can also use school name or author name as key words to see a list of publications by the school or the author for any combination of journals and time period between 1990 to date.

Recession or not??

J. Bradford Delong of UC Berkeley talks about the current US economy on Bloomberg Television, for transcript, see here.

How Property Rights Theory Furthers Strategic Management?

Here is the post.

2008 BYU-University of Utah Winter Strategy Conference

The BYU-University of Utah Winter Strategy Conference 2008 ended a couple of days ago in Sundance, Utah. Several papers have incorporated organizational economics reasoning into the analysis of business strategy, see here and here. In the final session, Jay Barney, Jackson Nickerson and Joel Baum discussed the methods related to the past and current strategy research. Many other papers can also be downloaded from the webpage.

Update: Nicolai Foss of Organizations and Markets blog offers his impressions and highlights of this conference:

• Michael Tushman (HBS) did a nice and interesting piece of advertising for his notion of organizational “ambidexterity.”
• Evan Rawley (Wharton) presented an excellent paper on ownership arrangements in the taxi industry, concentrating on deregulation (that allows taxi companies to offer limo services) has resulted in an increase of drivers' ownership of taxis.
• Lyda Bigelow (UUtah) presented some fascinating current work with Nick Argyres on how economic organization varies over the industry life cycle (extending their recent Management Science paper on the same subject by including considerations of competitive positioning).
• Jay Barney, Jackson Nickerson and Joel Baum made three excellent presentations in a panel on “Research Methods Opportunities and Challenges in Strategy.” Jay pointed that the key idea of strategic management of successfully matching idiosyncratic capabilities to opportunities is at conflict with the dominant empirical approach of predicting means. Theorizing about individual firm-level effects while estimating an average can be highly misleading, a point he illustrated by discussing the diversification-discount literature. He argued that hierarchical Bayesian methods may help solve the conundrum. Jackson concentrated on the endogeneity problem, pointing out that only 10 years ago most empirical strategy researcher essentially didn’t know about endogeneity. However, strategy had clearly catched up since then, and in general empirical strategy scholars (meaning 98% of strategy scholars) were now approaching economists in econometric sophistication. Joel Baum linked up with Barney by arguing that because strategic management is taken up with extreme events, scholars should take much more of an interest in Extreme Statistics, looking at Paretian rather than Gaussian distributions).

Two Interviews

One is Peter Bernstein, author of the great books Capital Ideas (I just finished reading in winter vacation) and Against the Gods, interviewed by Tom Keene of Bloomberg.

The other is Vernon Smith, former Nobel Leaurate, author of Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms, interviewed by EconTalk host Russ Roberts.