Comments for The NEP-HIS Blog

Comment on The State of Business and Economic History in Africa by Does Africa Need Business History? What About Canada? | The Past Speaks

Does Africa Need Business History? What About Canada? | The Past Speaks — Thu, 16 May 2013 11:15:24 +0000

[…] the title of a new post by Dr Stephanie Decker over on the NEP-HIS blog. Decker points out that Africa has been […]

Comment on “If they couldn’t guarantee the property rights of the land they gave away, how could they possibly sell it?”: Land Privatization and Property Rights in the Nineteenth Century Neo-Europes by Manuel Bautista

Manuel Bautista — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:12:50 +0000

Hi Bob! I think you are totally right. Sumner and Alan are not rejecting the institutional or the factor-endowments hypotheses, but rather helping us problematize the land question to tackle the diversity of cases in the historical record.

Comment on Knowing the Who: Identifying the effect of entrepreneurs on firms by The incentives for black and white entrepreneurs in South-Africa | Real-World Economics Review Blog

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:48:00 +0000

[...] size, age and location. Interestingly, more qualified entrepreneurs had a larger negative impact. (Read the review here.) Entrepreneurship clearly [...]

Comment on Knowing the Who: Identifying the effect of entrepreneurs on firms by The incentives for entrepreneurs | Johan Fourie's blog

The incentives for entrepreneurs | Johan Fourie's blog — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 05:13:54 +0000

[...] Interestingly, more qualified entrepreneurs had a larger negative impact. (Read the review here.) Entrepreneurship clearly [...]

Comment on Knowing the Who: Identifying the effect of entrepreneurs on firms by Russell Pittman

Russell Pittman — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:48:33 +0000

I remember hearing — don’t know if it’s true — that the price of the stock of the Disney Company surged on the news of Walt’s death, since he had refused to re-release old movies for which there was a continuing demand. Same for Giant Foods — when old Izzy Cohen died, the company immediately discontinued the bulk product aisle that had been his personal project. Of course, 2 anecdotes — even if true — do not a dataset make.

Comment on Knowing the Who: Identifying the effect of entrepreneurs on firms by Paloma Fernández

Paloma Fernández — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 16:05:25 +0000

Very interesting study, and discussion. Only an issue to discuss: collective dynamism of businesses beyond individuals is not correctly measured, and compared to static effects of immediate death of founder. If institutions and cultural path dependence could be taken into account, maybe authors could analyze that there may be in some places, periods and sectors longer business lyfe beyond death of founder. Family business historians, and business demography, have long time ago demonstrated the thesis of this working paper: that only a minority of businesses survive the founder. But this conclusion is often an average of businesses from different sectors and territories. Endurance and longevity, as competitiveness, often have a close relationship with sector specialization and embeddedness of that specialization in a territory. Districts are craddle for business survival, not always under the same legal name. What do we want to measure? Longevity of a given registered company, or entrepreneurship of the people working on a business and how they use tacit and intangible know how if one firm in other firms. Entrepreneurial sectors, in a territory, with a dynamic evolutionary perspective could provide more real knowledge about flows of entrepreneurs from one business to another. The reinvention of old districts like those in the Lancashire or Catalonia are good examples about the need to see entrepreneurship in an aggregated dynamic perspective. Companies can disappear, but we still see entrepreneurship in some sectors, and regions old and new. Literature about how innovation (is not that the key idea of entrepreneurship?) often takes place in communities of knowledge, provides many examples about how collective entrepreneurship is what a sector or territory really needs. In many communities there are leading figures, but they need teams, and teams can survive and must survive leaders. We should measure the creation of conditions that favour succession of entrepreneurship between individuals and groups. A founder that is not able tocreate teams can create short-term entrepreneurship. A business founder that creates teams creates conditions for the transfer of long-term entrepreneurship.

Comment on Do banks facilitate economic growth? If so, what type? by NBE Permits Banks to Engage in Non-Banking Businesses | Allana Potash Blog

NBE Permits Banks to Engage in Non-Banking Businesses | Allana Potash Blog — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 23:29:56 +0000

[...] Do banks facilitate economic growth? If so, what type? (nephist.wordpress.com) [...]

Comment on Sunbeam gets toasted by Marisa Agostini

Marisa Agostini — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:46:30 +0000

There is no need to apologize: the review was very useful because it pushed us to reflect on the issues it raised and to clarify better the point in question. So, thank you again for your precious comment.
With my best regards,
Marisa Agostini

Comment on Sunbeam gets toasted by bbatiz

bbatiz — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:30:52 +0000

I think the author’s indication is right. Our use of the expression ‘fraudulent scheme’ was, on hind sight, a mistake. Please accept our apologies on this matter.
Yours sincerely
Masayoshi Noguchi

Comment on Sunbeam gets toasted by Marisa Agostini

Marisa Agostini — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 18:24:14 +0000

REPLY TO MASAYOSHI NOGUCHI’S LAST COMMENT. Thanks a lot for your review. We’d like to just precise the following. The above indication does NOT only refer to the technical nature of the accounting fraud committed and the professional judgment exercised for the degree of materiality: it refers to auditors’ professional judgment about the fraud of Sunbeam. The paper emphasizes the differentiation between auditors’ involvement in the fraud and creative auditing: it does NOT assert that Arthur Andersen participated in the fraudulent scheme (so it does NOT need to give elucidations about this point) because Sunbeam represents a case of creative auditing (as deeply discussed in the paper). Both these types of auditing (i.e. involvement in the fraud and creative auditing) have emphasized that there is a gap between the beliefs and the preferences of the auditors with respect to those of the users of accounting reports: the latter assign to auditors a greater responsibility in discovering accounting manipulation and illegal acts than the extent to which auditors feel themselves responsible for such a task. As highlighted in the paper, recent regulations have tried to reduce both this gap and the second emphasized cause of audit failure, that is the lack of independence, by introducing some restrictions affecting the decision to outsource the internal audit function (such as the Sarbanes–Oxley Act in the USA) to external audit firms: after the notorious scandals, a fundamental change in the way audits are performed was then needed to win back the public’s trust. However, some inquiries on the quality of auditing during the recent financial crisis show that problems are far from being solved, and other studies cast doubt on the likelihood that the stricter internal controls imposed by recent regulations will be effective, if the “dramaturgical exchanges between the SEC and corporate regulatees” will go on as they did in the past (Shapiro & Matson, 2008, p. 224). Therefore, there should be more emphasis on past mistakes, as we have already highlighted in the introduction of the paper.

Comment on “If they couldn’t guarantee the property rights of the land they gave away, how could they possibly sell it?”: Land Privatization and Property Rights in the Nineteenth Century Neo-Europes by Robert E. Wright

Robert E. Wright — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:34:00 +0000

Let’s not go too far here! Naomi made an important point but we shouldn’t exaggerate the extent to which property rights were at risk in the U.S. Most of the time, most of the people felt largely secure, and rightly so. America’s economic growth suffered to the extent that some groups did not feel that their lives, liberty, and property were adequately protected. So we need to think in terms of when, where, and how much (or how little) property rights were protected, not zeroes and ones over decades or centuries. The economic incentives of, say, freedpersons trapped into debt peonage in the postbellum South were vastly different from those of, say, immigrant Scandinavians taking up homesteads in Minnesota or the Dakota territories at the same time. I think what Sumner and Alan are trying to do, at least what I hope they are trying to do, is to fill out that subtle panorama, not to throw out the institutional growth hypothesis altogether.

Comment on Male organ and economic growth: does size matter? by Manuel Bautista

Manuel Bautista — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 17:21:51 +0000

Maestro, this is definitely one of the best entries in the blog. I just referred some friends to it and we had a great discussion.

Comment on Do banks facilitate economic growth? If so, what type? by Is All Finance Good Finance? What are the Lessons of Antebellum US History? « The Past Speaks

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 09:26:19 +0000

[...] historian who works at the Queen’s University Management School in Belfast, has published a review of a recent article by Matthew Jaremski (Colgate University) and Peter Rousseau (Vanderbilt [...]

Comment on To Get Published or Not to Get Published: Challenges and Opportunities in Economics from 1970 to Present. by Fred Lee

Fred Lee — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:34:29 +0000

The top five journals referred to in the article/review have two characteristics: (1) they are mainstream economic journals, and (2) they generally publish authors who have graduated or employed by the top ten mainstream economics departments. This tight relationship is certainly evident for the QJE and JPE. Ever since Diamond’s list of ‘diamond’ journals in 1989 and the subsequent research assessment exercises around the world, economists not associated with the top departments have been pressured in trying to get published in these journals where one could argue they do not belong because they are associated with a lower class of economics departments. So it is not surprising that the journals acceptance rates have fallen. The class nature that defines both the top journals and top economics departments and their interrelationships should have been explored by the reviewer. The first point of being mainstream journals raises the following query: if one is a heterodox economist then one would not publish in mainstream journals (largely because mainstream journals just reject their papers because they are not really economics), but rather publish in heterodox journals–such as the Cambridge Journal of Economics, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, Review of Radical Political Economics, the Journal of Economic Issues, and Economy and Society. The issues about publishing in these journals may be different than the ones discussed in the paper and noted by the reviewer. However, the reviewer seems to suggest that only the issues associated with the five journals mentioned in the paper are the only issues that economists should be concerned/aware of. It would have been nice if the reviewer had at least acknowledged that these issues may be only relevant to those few economists that reside in the top departments. However, it is safe to say that the difficulty of heterodox economists publishing in the top heterodox journals is on par with the difficulty that mainstream economists face in publishing in the top mainstream journals–and the research quality of the articles in both sets of journals are the same but different.

Comment on To Get Published or Not to Get Published: Challenges and Opportunities in Economics from 1970 to Present. by missiaia

missiaia — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:46:42 +0000

Cool thanks!

Comment on To Get Published or Not to Get Published: Challenges and Opportunities in Economics from 1970 to Present. by Chris Colvin

Chris Colvin — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 10:29:35 +0000

Card and della Vigna also have a discussion of their paper over at voxEU: http://www.voxeu.org/article/nine-facts-about-top-journals-economics

Comment on Linking History and Management Discourse: Epistemology and Method by Stephen Linstead

Stephen Linstead — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:39:22 +0000

I’ve never used it as a textbook, but there was a special issue of Organizational Research Methods 2006 vol 9 devoted to the approach that might be useful. He’s a very approachable guy and would I’m sure be delighted to field any queries you might have.

Comment on Linking History and Management Discourse: Epistemology and Method by Giovanni Favero

Giovanni Favero — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:21:40 +0000

Thank you very much for the suggestion, this is very interesting for what I do as an economic historian working on the history of statistics!

Comment on Linking History and Management Discourse: Epistemology and Method by bbatiz

bbatiz — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:54:56 +0000

Hi Stephen
Many thanks for yours and the heads up. Gephart’s seems interesting:

http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book2437

I will have a look and might use it with my research methods PG course. Have you had any experience using it as a textbook?

Comment on Linking History and Management Discourse: Epistemology and Method by Stephen Linstead

Stephen Linstead — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:43:30 +0000

A relevant multimethod approach to the qualitivisation of quantitative information – focusing on how it is used by those affected by it – is Robert Gephart’s ethnostatistics. It integrates documentary and archival data into broader qualitative and quantitative methods and opens up a number of narrative opportunities by balancing information on how statistics are produced with information on how they are used and interpreted in specific historical events.