2008 witnessed a double shock to the post Cold War order. The North Atlantic financial system suffered a historic crisis, which could be managed only by unprecedented financial intervention by the US state. Weeks before Wall Street imploded, Russia invaded Georgia, a country which earlier in the year had been promised NATO membership. Too little remarked upon at the time, this paper will argue that this conjuncture revealed stark limits to the North Atlantic system of security and financial stability, which since 2013 have come back to haunt us in the on-going Ukrainian crisis.
Adam Tooze is the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History at Columbia University.
Note: New Location
CISAC Central Conference Room
Adam Tooze
Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of History
Speaker
Columbia University
Joseph Z. Perkins, a partner in Orrick's Silicon Valley office, is a member of the Technology Companies Group, which advises emerging companies and venture capital firms. Mr. Perkins focuses his practice on providing private venture financing and merger and acquisition services to Internet, high tech, and clean technology companies in the United States and Japan.
Some of Mr. Perkins's current and former clients include the following: • Bleacher Report (Sports media; acquired by Turner Broadcasting) • Doki Doki (stealth) • FOVE (Virtual reality hardware) • Getaround (Car sharing community) • Instagram (Photo social media; acquired by Facebook) • iSpace (Robotics) • Life360 (Family connectivity and safety) • Orchestra - aka Mailbox (e-mail management; acquired by Dropbox) • Ooma (VoiP hardware) • Pinterest (Social Media) • Say Media - fka VideoEgg (Advertising) • Social Finance (social lending) • UniversityNow (Online education) • WHILL (Personal Mobility)
Prior to receiving his Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School, Mr. Perkins spent four years as an officer of a company that provides language and travel services to Japanese travelers.
Seminar Description
The idea of raising money through venture capital can be daunting if you’ve never gone through that process before. In this presentation, we will discuss various aspects of the fundraise process, including how to choose your investor and prepare for a term sheet, key terms to look for in the financing, and how to get to close as quickly as possible. Learn about different types of investors, what they look for in their potential investments, and what they bring to the table in accelerating a startup’s growth. We’ll also review specific scenarios and how various liquidation preferences can impact your company’s exit.
A conference that honored the life and scholarly contributions of Stanford economist Masahiko Aoki was held at Stanford. Dozens of friends, family and community members paid tribute to Aoki, the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Professor of Japanese Studies and Professor of Economics, emeritus, who died in July at the age of 77.
Eleven renowned economists and social scientists gave talks on Aoki’s extensive fields of research in economic theory, institutional analysis, corporate governance, and the Japanese and Chinese economies at the Dec. 4 conference, which was followed by a memorial ceremony the next day.
“When we contacted people to speak at this conference, few people turned us down,” said Stanford professor Takeo Hoshi. “The reason for this is Masa. It shows how much Masa was respected and how much his work is valued.”
The events were hosted by the Japan Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), Graduate School of Business, Department of Economics and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
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Aoki came to Stanford in 1967 as an assistant professor, held faculty appointments at Kyoto University and Harvard, and returned to Stanford in 1984. He retired to emeritus status at Stanford in 2005.
Throughout the conference, Aoki was described as an astute professor and colleague, valuable mentor and loyal friend by the many speakers and participants who shared works, stories and multimedia featuring their interactions with Aoki.
Aoki pioneered the field of comparative institutional analysis (CIA) with a team of scholars at Stanford: Avner Greif, John Litwack, Paul Milgrom and Yingyi Qian, among others. CIA analyzes and compares different institutions that evolve to regulate different societies.
Masahiko Aoki (far left) is pictured with colleagues on the Stanford campus in the late 1960s.
“Masa had a good background in looking at the economy as a whole, financial institutions as a whole – not just how numbers or actors economically interact – but also the people who interact within a given institutional framework,” said Koichi Hamada, a professor emeritus at Yale University.
“Masa had a good background in looking at the economy as a whole, financial institutions as a whole – not just how numbers or actors economically interact…”
-Koichi Hamada, Yale University
Aoki applied a systematic lens to everything he studied, a “take society as a total entity” approach, Hamada said.
Aoki grew up in Japan, and developed a deep interest in Japanese politics at an early age. He was actively involved in student movements in the early 1960s, at the heart of which was a campaign against a controversial U.S.-Japan security treaty. China became another great interest of his as the country began to undergo economic transformation and modernization.
Throughout his career, Aoki traveled to Japan and China often, and sought to better inform policy debates by engaging scholars, government leaders and journalists there.
He believed in sharing lessons learned from his own scholarly analyses on what constitute institutions, particularly the “people” aspects – the employees, their cognitive abilities and levels of participation.
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Top left to right: Yingyi Qian of Tsinghau University talks with Avner Greif of Stanford University and Hugh Patrick of Columbia University. / Koichi Hamada of Yale University delivers his remarks titled "Masahiko Aoki: A Social Scientist." Bottom: Reiko Aoki, the wife of Masahiko Aoki, listens in to Kenneth Arrow, a professor emeritus at Stanford University. Credit: Rod Searcey
Aoki was not only a scholar of institutions but also a builder of them.
“Amid a time of diplomatic tensions between China and Japan…Masa was able to bring Japanese, Chinese and American economists together to study and do research,” said Yingyi Qian, dean and professor at the school of economics and management at Tsinghua.
At Stanford, Aoki played a leading role in the creation of the Stanford Japan Center and a multi-day conference that convened annually in Kyoto on issues of mutual concern between Asia-Pacific countries and the United States.
“Masa Aoki’s legacy will serve as an integral guidepost for many years to come. May his soul rest in peace.”
-Kotaro Suzumura, Hitotsubashi University
Earlier this year, Aoki was hospitalized for lung disease. Even at that stage, he worked tirelessly to revise a paper that examines the institutional development of China and Japan in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
Aoki was also fondly remembered for his mentorship of students at Stanford and other universities he taught at.
“He was an original and unique professor – quite different from others that I’ve met in many respects. He was generous with his time, not hierarchical,” said Miguel Angel Garcia Cestona, who studied for a doctorate at Stanford and now teaches at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.
Garcia Cestona, among other former students, spoke of Aoki as a friend and shared memories of their former professor hosting them at his home.
This paper studies how private information is incorporated into prices, using a unique setting from the eighteenth century that is closer to stylized models of price discovery than modern-day markets. Specifically, the paper looks at English securities traded in both London and Amsterdam. Private information reached Amsterdam through sailing boats that sailed only twice a week and in adverse weather could not sail at all. Results are consistent with a Kyle model in which informed agents trade strategically. Most importantly, the speed of information revelation in Amsterdam depended on the expected time until the private signal would become public.
As Silicon Valley prepares to welcome Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Stanford historian Priya Satia argues that Indians and Americans should remember the state-abetted violence and intolerance of minorities in the recent past as enthusiasm for "Digital India" overwhelms concerns of religious and individual freedom in the September 18, 2015 edition of The Huffington Post.
Kenji Kushida will provide an overview of canonical works of Silicon Valley, including work of Martin Kenney and his classic co-edited volume "Understanding Silicon Valley" and other more recent work drawn from the Stanford Silicon Valley - New Japan project’s "Top Ten Reading List of Silicon Valley." He will also share insights from a recent report co-authored with Richard Dasher, Nobuyuki Harada, Takeo Hoshi, and Tetsuji Okazaki entitled "Institutional Foundations for Growth" which partially draws from research on Silicon Valley.
Kanetaka Maki will present his new research from a paper entitled "Milestones to University-Based Startup Success: What Is the Impact of Academic Inventor Involvement?” Based on the data analysis of 533 University of California startups, he will explain the impact of inventor involvement in the growth and success of university-based startups.
Mathias Hoffmann is Professor of Economics at the University of Zurich. His research focuses on the macroeconomic aspects of international financial integration and on the link between financial markets and the macro-economy more generally. His recent published articles include papers on the determinants of international capital flows and imbalances, the international transmission of business cycles, on international risk sharing and banking regulation. Prior to arriving in Zurich, he was Professor at the University of Dortmund in Germany and a Lecturer at Southampton University (UK). He holds a PhD in Economics from the European University Institute in Florence and obtained his undergraduate education in economics and mathematics at WHU School of Management, Brandeis University and the University of Bonn.
Mathias Hoffmann is a fellow of CESifo Munich and has held visiting positions, at the University of California at Berkeley, the Deutsche Bundesbank, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority and Keio University.
What explains short-term fluctuations of stock prices? This paper exploits a natural experiment from the 18th century in which information flows were regularly interrupted for exogenous reasons. English shares were traded on the Amsterdam exchange and news came in on sailboats that were often delayed because of adverse weather conditions. The paper documents that prices responded strongly to boat arrivals, but there was considerable volatility in the absence of news. The evidence suggests that this was largely the result of the revelation of (long-lived) private information and the (transitory) impact of uninformed liquidity trades on intermediaries' risk premia.
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