Heterogeneous Capital, Entrepreneurship, and Economic Organization

We outline an Austrian approach to economic organization based on the entrepreneur and the Austrian idea of capital as heterogeneous and time-dimensioned, tow themes associated with Israel Kirzner's contributions. We provide a novel interpretation of capital heterogeneity based on the notion of attributes, argue that attributes are costly to measure and that this links directly to the theory of economic organization. In particular, we develop insights in economic organization based on the notion that entrepreneurs will often have to experiment with capital assets to gauge the value of these assets when deployed in production.Austrian Economics, capital, knowledge

Contracts and the Institutional Environment for Electricity Reform

Recent law and economics literature suggests that courts and administrative agencies should allow utilities to renegotiate supply contracts signed prior to restructuring, as an attractive alternative to continued regulatory oversight or possible bankruptcy

Structural relatedness of lysis proteins from colicinogenic plasmids and icosahedral coliphages.

The host-lysis-inducing functions of phi X174 protein E and MS2 protein L were recently shown to reside on the N-terminal and C-terminal halves of the two respective lysis proteins. In the present study it is shown that the small lysis proteins encoded in various colicinogenic plasmids share local sequence similarities and certain structural characteristics with the essential peptides of their coliphage-coded counterparts. Despite their dissimilar sizes and origins, it is suggested that the colicinogenic lysis proteins are functionally analogous and evolutionarily related to those of icosahedral single-stranded DNA and RNA phages

Evidence from Corporate Divestitures

We assess the argument that corporate acquisitions are driven mainly by agency considerations. This argument holds that certain kinds of mergers—mergers between firms in unrelated industries, mergers between firms with large differences in price-earnings ratios, and mergers financed with stock swaps, for example—will consistently fail, eventually being reversed in a divestiture. Appealing to Mises’s theory of entrepreneurship, we argue instead that divestitures of previously acquired assets usually result from experimentation and learning, healthy attributes of a market economy. We then describe empirical evidence that the long-term success or failure of corporate acquisitions cannot, in general, be predicted by measures of agency conflicts. We also show that mistaken acquisitions are more likely under certain circumstances, namely during periods of intense, industry-specific regulatory activity. This is consistent with the view, expressed repeatedly in the Austrian literature, that entrepreneurial error is associated with government intervention—in particular, with government ownership of property and interference with the price system. JEL Classifications: D84, G34, G38 Key words: acquisitions, divestitures, entrepreneurship, market process, experimentatio

Imaging Spin Reorientation Transitions in Consecutive Atomic Co layers

By means of spin-polarized low-energy electron microscopy (SPLEEM) we show that the magnetic easy-axis of one to three atomic-layer thick cobalt films on ruthenium crystals changes its orientation twice during deposition: one-monolayer and three-monolayer thick films are magnetized in-plane, while two-monolayer films are magnetized out-of-plane, with a Curie temperature well above room temperature. Fully-relativistic calculations based on the Screened Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker (SKKR) method demonstrate that only for two-monolayer cobalt films the interplay between strain, surface and interface effects leads to perpendicular magnetization.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Presented at the 2005 ECOSS conference in Berlin, and at the 2005 Fall meeting of the MRS. Accepted for publication at Phys. Rev. Lett., after minor change