International workshop, "The Economics of the Modern Firm"

The Economics of the Modern Firm

Workshop, September 21-22, 2007

Jönköping, Sweden

CALL FOR PAPERS

Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) will hold a workshop with the theme “The Economics of the Modern Firm”. The workshop is financed by Torsten and Ragnar Söderberg´s Foundation. Keynote speakers will be Professor Oliver E. Williamson from University of California, Berkeley and Professor Dennis C. Mueller from University of Vienna, Austria. The program committee, chaired by Professor Per-Olof Bjuggren, invites you to submit an abstract of a paper to be presented at the workshop. Abstracts are due by April 15, 2007.

Please email your abstract to the workshop secretary johanna.palmberg@jibs.hj.se. Abstract must be sent as an MS Word document and should be of a maximum of 200 words and include contact information, including, e-mail, telephone, fax and address.

Acceptance of abstracts will be communicated by May 15, 2007. The completed version of the paper should be sent by August 10, 2007.

The intention of the workshop is to provide an occasion for researchers within the fields of economics, law and management to meet, present and discuss papers that have theories of the firm as a common denominator. Papers that have contracts and transactions in focus are especially welcome.

The background to the workshop is the revolutionary development of the theory of the firm that has taken place during the last 35 years. In spite of all the progress in the field the traces in microeconomic and industrial organization textbooks are scant. The comments made by Ronald Coase 1971 in a NBER meeting about a non-existent treatment of organization of economic activities within and between firms in industrial organization textbooks are still valid.

But in other ways the situation today is quite different from 35 years ago. At the same NBER meeting Coase also commented upon his celebrated article from 1937 (“The Nature of the Firm”) with the words “much cited and little used”. This comment turned out to be a truthful description of the situation in 1971; but not true for the rest of the 1970s. The same year as the NBER meeting (1971) Oliver E Williamson published a seminal article in American Economic Review; which was the start of a large number of books and articles, that similar to Coase, centred round the importance of transaction costs in analyses of economic organizations. A new field of transaction cost economics emerged.

Some other articles from which new fields of research have emanated were also published in the 1970s. The team production and the property rights perspective introduced by Alchian & Demsetz (1972) and the corporate governance perspective in Jensen and Meckling (1976) have been especially influential. From the 1980s the evolutionary theory of the firm presented by Nelson & Winter (1982) and the new property rights approach by Grossman & Hart (1986) have also reshaped research in a similar fashion.

These and other branches of the growing tree of the theory of the firm are the sources of inspiration for the workshop on “The Economics of the Modern Firm” that will take place in Jönköping Sweden September 21-22, 2007