On the current credit crisis

Ya, I totally agree with your observation, the credit crisis has indeed spread wide spread fear psychosis… I can see the effects of it in Hong Kong too; everywhere you could see people speaking about this… In fact, HKUST organized a panel discussion on this issue on the day when the congress finally decided to go ahead with the bailout. People are still not sure how the financial crisis that originated in the US market would affect the other markets (e.g., the Asian ones), but, they seem to be sure that there certainly would be an impact… Well, why wouldn’t it! After all, the emerging markets (especially the ones in Asia) have enjoyed the spillover of the uncalled-for liquidity in the US over the past decade and when the US markets get hit, it should have a spillover effect on the other markets that have benefited during the hay days of the US economy.

Here is my theory about the current financial crisis… Many observers suggest that this crisis is triggered by under-regulation of the financial markets in the US. Although this view could be true, it only explains the $700 billion (which I agree is a phenomenal amount), but it does not explain the base $30 billion of defaulted loans by the borrowers in the US (which though is relatively miniscule, is the underlying asset that bubbled into the $700 billion credit derivative crisis). Of course, some observers might immediately argue that this could simply be an incentive issue. Yes, it is an incentive issue, but the issue could be much deeper than mere agency concerns. The incentive system and competition in the lending market might have prompted the lenders (like commercial banks and other lending agencies like Freddie Mac) to lure borrowers into borrowing loans that they would have difficulty in repaying. However, this isn’t a recent phenomenon, this is how growth in the economy has been triggered for ages. Many of you would agree that liquidity could trigger economic growth. The central bank sets caps on borrowing and lending rates as a means of managing the liquidity in the economy. When the lending and borrowing rates are lowered, it results in greater credit offtake, lesser savings and more spending. This in turn enhances corporate profitability and it creates new jobs, which in turn increases the repaying capacity of the society as a whole and makes the economy stronger. So, what did actually go wrong? It might be important to look at the factors that might have affected this economic cycle in the US to get a better perspective.

The interconnectedness of the markets that Brayden was speaking about perhaps might explain this… I believe that the increase in liquidity in the US market might have had its desired consequence – more credit offtake, lesser savings, greater spending. But, the cycle should have taken a different turn from there… thanks to globalization. The US trade deficit explain some part of this story. Yes, people in the US have been spending a lot and the corporates have been gaining out of this increase in spending, but the share of the US spending that goes to demestic firms should have taken a toll…thanks to cheap imports from emergign economies. So, lesser profitability for US firms, which means lesser jobs in domestic US firms that have traditionally been employing domestic employees. Addionally, the cheap international labor market takes a major share of those remaining jobs in the US (what is popularly known as outsourcing). Net on net, there are fewer good jobs for an average American and lesser is the average repaying capacity of the Americans, which results in increased bad loans…

So… Are we as a global community in a bad shape? Probably not? As I said, the emerging economies have benefitted tremendously from the liquidity in the US and in other developed economies. These economies have seen their growth rate soring and even a high inflation and the resultant checks on liquidity seemed not to have slowed down these economies. Of course, when the key buyers (the consumer in developed economies) reducing their buying spree there would certainly be a reduction in the growth of the emerging economies, but in the last decade or so the wealth of the average individual in these emergign nations have increased and the drop in the buying capacity of the US consumers might be taken care of by the gain in the buying capacity of the consumers of the emerging economies. So… what we see might be just a shift in the financial balance and not an overall collapse…

Response to the post:"does academic research hurt mba programs?" in http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/

There are three related questions here. First, in research oriented B-Schools, what provides the highest incentive for faculties – teaching productivity or research productivity? Second, how does research productivity of the faculty affect student outcomes? Third, how does teaching productivity of the faculty affect student outcomes? The first question has been unequivocally addressed in the award winning study by (Gomez-Mejia, Luis and Balkin, 1992). They find that faculty pay is very highly correlated to research productivity (as in top tier publications) and to a lesser extent to teaching productivity, (mostly when research productivity is also high). This they argue results from the efforts of the academic administrators to minimize the agency issue that arises from the potential motivation of the faculty to engage in self-serving behavior that is not part of their academic role (which ideally should be creation and dissemination of knowledge). However, their finding brings light to the fact that the administrators are concerned more with one dimension of agency – the creation of knowledge and less with the other dimension of agency – the dissemination of knowledge. Rather, it suggests that administrators consider the creation of knowledge to be more important than the dissemination of knowledge. Hence, this creates a second level of agency concern – from the perspective of the students who are consumers of knowledge.
The MBA students, who pay hefty fees towards a high quality business education, expect that they get the best out of the school, which in their terms involves not only the availability of highly knowledgeable faculty in the B-school, but also their ability and willingness to transfer relevant knowledge. However, the incentive structure to faculties creates an agency situation, wherein the faculty are knowledgeable, but are less motivated, or able or both to transfer relevant knowledge to the students. So, what could the correlation between research productivity and student performance actually mean? The ranking systems could be one source of bias. For example, the financial times pays high weights on faculty research productivity. Such ratings attract good researchers capable of doing good research (which further enhances the schools rating), good students who are capable of finding good jobs and good employers capable of providing good jobs. Therefore, from the perspective of the student outcomes, good research probably serves more as signal to the external world about the quality of the B-school than as a tool to enhance the knowledge of the students (which it ideally should be). However, this signal could completely go off target in predicting the process (whether student outcomes are attained through the dissemination of knowledge); though it might predict accurately the outcome (whether the students get high paying jobs).
One neat way to test this selection bias is to look at a situation where research is given a weight close to zero, yet students get excellent jobs. Consider the case of top tier Indian B-Schools like the various campuses of the Indian Institute of Management (IIM). If you go through the profiles of faculties of all the IIMs, you would find that the whole IIM system produces on an average less than one top tier publication (by the standards of say financial times) a year. However, an average graduate from these schools has around three offers in the best domestic and international companies before he or she graduates. On an average, they are paid more (inflation adjusted) than most top tier graduate is in US. Top companies woo these graduates even as they are in their first semester. Ironically, these B-Schools are ranked No.1 in India, but they do not even appear anywhere in the top 100 in global rankings. So what is the difference? The IIM system has a very stringent selection process for students. They select less that 0.1% (that is right, less than 1 in 1000) of the applicants each year. These select few are extremely good with numbers (which is what the consulting and financial industries yearn for). Hence, the first round of selection is already done. Hence, even if they do not get much from the MBA program, their raw brilliance would get them the best jobs. Of course, that does not mean that the students do not gain anything from the program. The program is very rigorous and the faculties are highly skilled at disseminating existing knowledge, even if they do not create much new knowledge.

On Race and racism!

I have been hearing a lot about race and racism these days (more about the second). Discussing race and racism has become some sort of taboo, so most of what I have been hearing is everything about race that it is not... i.e., people pretend to shut their eyes to differences. This trend has also entered management research these days (see for example Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998). What people probably ignore is that differences do exist and it manifests itself in different ways. It is these differences that makes life interesting. So, why ignore it to just sound politically right? Why not celebrate our differences?

Here is my take on race. I think, when it comes to race, there are four kinds of people, 1) "I like my race, I like the other races too", 2) "I like my race, I hate every other race", 3) "I hate my race, I like some another race" and 4) "I hate racism". The first and forth category are noharmers, the second harm others, and the third harm themselves. The race challenge could be handled in two ways, 1) Teach people to shut their racist eyes and say all humans are alike. Which is what most recent attempts do. 2) Teach people to understand that there are difference, acknowledge the differences and live amicably with one another... The first is more of an utopian task, the second is reasonable... As we say in India "Unity in Diversity"... Lets learn to acknowledge our differences and live amicably...

Google is not the 'BEST' search engine!

I had been a devout preacher of google from as early as the summer of 2000 when I was first exposed to it. It was, in my opinion, a largely democratic and efficient search engine. However, my opinion about google’s democratic nature has failed. It is more of a commercial web crawler that takes money to index web sites and to list sites in the first page of a search. I thought that it was still ok as long as I could get what I wanted. These days even that doesn’t happen. For someone to have google search his or her webpage, it is not just enough that a valid webpage exist, but it is now imperative that his or her webpage is designed to google's specifications. Which is, google requires that, for a webpage to be searchable, links to that webpage should exist in other "AUTHENTIC' webpages. This is very undemocratic. How could some one who is new to the internet have links to his or her webpage in another "AUTHENTIC" webpage (by the way, the word "AUTHENTIC" is poorly defined too!%^#%*!~* ). However, search engines like yahoo are not as bad as google is. For example, I had created a new webpage from my university's server - http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv - however, I tried searching my name "Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode" using a number of combinations, but I would get every website with my name in it other than the one that is my own. I then searched for the url http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv. To my surprise, I got this message "Your search - http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv - did not match any documents.” I then tried searching my name in yahoo, just to see if there is anything wrong with my meta data. I was thrilled to see that my search for "Rajiv Krishnan Kozhikode" returned my webpage http://ihome.ust.hk/~rajiv as the first in the search list.However, this is not to say that google is a bad search engine. It only means that it is not the BEST. If you are searching for something that you think ought to exist in the net and if you do not find it though google, do not get disappointed. Your belief about the site's existence need not be wrong; rather google is not CAPABLE of searching it for you. Try yahoo or some other search engine instead and you might end up finding what you want without much difficulty. That said, I am still a fan of google, but for other reasons. It is good at searching scholarly work and it is good at searching data. Of course, I haven’t tried other search engines for these purposes, but I sure haven’t had the need yet.