Research Paper

Category: Research Paper

Checking Your Financial Plumbing

At the recent Lawrence Scholars in Business banking summit, alumnus Rob Bearman suggested that a young person interested in a career in banking would do well to learn all s/he could about the recent financial crisis.   He suggested Andrew Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail as a good start.   Another place for a more academic flavor is the recent Journal of Economic Perspectives Symposium on Financial Plumbing.

The list looks like a good place to start an independent study project.  I can’t speak for the quality of the articles, except to say that the JEP authors are generally recognized area experts, and the pieces tend to be very readable and heavily documented.

Enjoy!


Innovation & the World Economy

That’s the title of Robert Litan’s speech from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and it is a crisp and interesting read.  Here’s a taste:

Entrepreneurs are vital to the economy not only because of the innovations they bring to the market, but also for the jobs they create. The Kauffman Foundation sponsored a study recently to look at the source of job growth in the United States since 1980. The conclusion is remarkable, or at least I believe it to be. Since 1980 until the recession, all net new jobs—net meaning gross jobs minus layoffs — have been created by firms under five years old. Think about that. That means all existing firms as of 1980 have not increased their employment since that year. In fact, if anything, the firms that existed in 1980, as a group, have lost employees. Using these data, we have made a rough estimate that at least 1/3 percent of our employment and a somewhat smaller fraction of our GDP since 1980 is due to young new firms that have since grown. These are amazing facts.

The piece contains some nice blurbs about the difference between state-guided capitalism, managerial capitalism, and entrepreneurial capitalism.   These concepts seem to follow the Schumpeterian notion of innovation, which is why it’s important to understand Schumpeter (!)