Praise for My Doctoral Dissertation by Prof. Robert Axtell

From: Robert Axtell
To: Staffan Canback
Sent: Thursday, December 12, 2002, 2:45 PM

Dear Staffan Canback:
My research assistant has recently uncovered your Ph.D. dissertation on the web, and I have had a chance to peruse it briefly.

First, I find it a very nice monograph and this is not just because the subject interests me. Your literature review is thorough, the statistical methodology is appropriate, and the results are clean and important.

Second, I think you have significantly pushed the frontier of testing ‘transaction cost’ ideas. Adherents of that school will be in your debt. Third, and most specifically, I think your analysis of the U-shaped neoclassical cost function is excellent, and gives away your experience beyond academic economics–it takes a practitioner to debunk propositions that are empirically false, although logically compelling. My mentor, Herbert Simon, would have approved.

Lastly, I am doing some writing myself at the moment on firm sizes, an invited contribution to a law journal. I am largely working outside the transaction cost tradition, taking more of a macro/stochastic process approach to firm growth and hence size. Indeed, the extreme regularity in the U.S. firm size data suggests to me that some high-level, relatively simple mechanism must be at work. To this message I will attach my paper from “Science” last year on the overall U.S. firm size distribution, in case you haven’t seen it.

Once again, congratulations on a very strong piece of work!

Best wishes, Rob Axtell -+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Robert Axtell Fellow and Co-Founder Center on Social and Economic Dynamics The Brookings Institution