Self-productivity and complementarities in human development : evidence from MARS

This paper investigates the role of self-productivity and home resources in capability formation from infancy to adolescence. In addition, we study the complementarities between basic cognitive, motor and noncognitive abilities and social as well as academic achievement. Our data are taken from the Mannheim Study of Children at Risk (MARS), an epidemiological cohort study following the long-term outcome of early risk factors. Results indicate that initial risk conditions cumulate and that differences in basic abilities increase during development. Self-productivity rises in the developmental process and complementarities are evident. Noncognitive abilities promote cognitive abilities and social achievement. There is remarkable stability in the distribution of the economic and socio-emotional home resources during the early life cycle. This is presumably a major reason for the evolution of inequality in human development

The theory of the firm and its critics: a stocktaking and assessment

Includes bibliographical references."Prepared for Jean-Michel Glachant and Eric Brousseau, eds. New Institutional Economics: A Textbook, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.""This version: August 22, 2005."Since its emergence in the 1970s the modern economic or Coasian theory of the firm has been discussed and challenged by sociologists, heterodox economists, management scholars, and other critics. This chapter reviews and assesses these critiques, focusing on behavioral issues (bounded rationality and motivation), process (including path dependence and the selection argument), entrepreneurship, and the challenge from knowledge-based theories of the firm

Textual reproduction: Collaboration, gender, and authorship in Renaissance drama

This dissertation emerges from a pair of related perceptions about the English Renaissance that criticism has largely ignored. First, collaboration was the dominant mode of textual production in the Renaissance theatre, before copyright, authorial ownership, and an idealized conception of individuated style. Second, textual production--the writing, performing, collecting, and publishing of plays--occurred within the context of conflicting sex/gender systems; moreover, the printed forms of play-texts participated in the construction of those systems. This dissertation proposes an historically rigorous reconsideration of both textual and sexual reproduction at the points of their intersection. Chapter One, Seeing Double, revises our conception of collaboration in light of recent historicist and post-structuralist treatments of authorship. Arguing that criticism has traditionally framed readings of the drama with an anachronistic notion of the author, the chapter offers an interpretation of The Knight of the Burning Pestle based in the collaborative practice of Renaissance theatrical and textual production. Chapter Two, Between Gentlemen, traces the relation of male friendship, homoeroticism, class, and collaboration in period conduct books, essays, The Two Noble Kinsmen and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Chapter Three, Representing Author/ity, analyzes an emerging author-function and patriarchalism in plays like Pericles that place authorial figures on stage, and relates these representations to contemporaneous folio volumes that reconceptualized the collection of texts around a single authorial figure. Chapter Four, Reproducing Works, begins by tracing the transition of play-texts from theatrical performance to printed quartos; focusing on title pages, it argues that quartos advertised themselves as ephemeral and collaborative re-presentations of theatrical events. Returning to the dramatic folios and their patriarchal pedigree, the chapter concentrates upon the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio. Got by Two Fathers, the textual offspring of two Masculines espous\u27d (in the words of one of its commendatory poems), this volume illuminates both absolutist/patriarchal and homoerotic textual reproduction, and inscribes the competition of authorship and collaboration at a decisive moment in English history. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of the folio collections of Margaret Cavendish\u27s plays, volumes that register the difficulties of a woman attempting to insert herself into a genre and textual economy normatively transacted by men

Towards a Formal Model of the Transaction Cost Theory of the Firm

This paper attempts to formalize the transaction cost theory of the firm. Building on the formal approach of Grossman and Hart (1986), a model is developed to capture the essential elements of the transaction cost theory, particularly those that are distinct from the formal property rights theory (PRT). In contrast to the PRT model, ours focuses on specific investments in alienable assets and ex post transactional inefficiencies. We define integration of two firms to imply common ownership of alienable assets from both firms, which entails control rights over the use of the assets as well as claims on their residual value. One important advantage of the model is its ability to deal with integration between non-owner-managed firms