Luigi Zingales: belief

Transcript context

…Last question before we open up to the crowd. You’re now director of the Stigler Center in Chicago, and you’ve studied organizations for your whole career. Given what you’ve learned — we’re here, of course, at the Mercatus Center hosting this event — but how will this shape what you will do with the Stigler Center, as an economist? I think that the first thing is spend time in hiring the best possible people. I think that one thing that works well in university is that we spend a huge amount of time selecting faculty. A lot of what we do is listening to seminars, reading papers, refereeing papers, selecting the next generation. What I’ve learned in various organizations is the best, most successful organizations are the ones that spend a huge amount of time selecting the good people. Because it’s very costly to fire — you don’t want to fire unless you have to. Once you get the right people in place, organizations, I wouldn’t say run themselves, but almost. If you don’t have the right people in place, you spend a lot of time fixing the hiring mistakes. Thank you very much for coming. My name’s David Wille. I’m a research assistant with the Mercatus Center. Part of our research is looking at the connection between the financial services industry and small business creation. As you know, on a number of measures, small business creation is down, innovation seems to be down in the US. What, in your view, is the connection, if any, between the financial services industry, the problems in that industry, and the decline in innovation, the decline of new business creation in the US? Thank you.…

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