No Easy Answer to ‘Too Big to Fail,’ Nobelist Williamson Says

By Vivien Lou Chen

Oct. 13 (Bloomberg) -- There’s no easy way to deal with the question of institutions whose failure might pose a threat to the financial system, said Oliver Williamson, co-winner of this year’s Nobel Economics Prize.

“There is no silver bullet,” Williamson, 77, said at a news conference yesterday at the University of California at Berkeley, where he is professor emeritus. “There is no instant answer that I or any of my students or any of my colleagues would be prepared to advance on that.”

Williamson is a founder of organizational economics -- the study of how institutions are created and developed and how they affect growth. In research that may have applications to the financial crisis, he suggested that it is better to regulate large companies than to try to break them up or limit their size.

The administration of President Barack Obama has proposed giving the Federal Reserve responsibility for overseeing financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

Williamson shared this year’s Nobel prize with Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist at Indiana University in Bloomington and the first woman to receive the economics award.

“There’s a possibility we could foresee some of the hazards,” such as those in the current crisis, and “take advance action,” Williamson said. The Fed and Treasury Department face “important organizational issues” similar to those raised by his work. Still, he said, he doesn’t think the crisis influenced the Nobel committee’s decision to award him the prize.

Williamson called himself “a lucky guy.”

In his academic work, Williamson found that large corporations exist primarily because they are efficient and benefit owners, workers, suppliers and customers, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said today in Stockholm.

To contact the reporter on this story: Vivien Lou Chen in San Francisco at o vchen1@bloomberg.net