---
title: "Thompson's 1997 working paper — independent of his 2007 paper — describes Argote, Beckman & Epple (1990) as adding labor turnover to Rapping's (1965) specification, not as a rival re-analysis"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
source_url: "https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/dev/papers/9712/9712001.pdf"
source_author: "Peter Thompson (University of Houston, Department of Economics)"
source_date: "1997-12 (working paper); published as \"How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Learn? New Evidence for an Old Case Study,\" Journal of Political Economy 109(1):103-137, 2001"
source_title: "How Much Did the Liberty Shipbuilders Learn? New Evidence for an Old Case Study"
source_venue: "EconWPA working-paper archive (dev/papers/9712), predecessor to Journal of Political Economy"
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "450f7192cf50df75268a1438c1b09f37b9440ca87ed531cf68810f345d120d3c"
source_quote: "Argote, Beckman and Epple (1990) have added labor turnover rates to Rapping's analysis without undermining his key findings."
independent_roots: 1
audit_status: "capture-verified — read directly via extract_pdf against the EconWPA working-paper archive copy (verified-TLS fetch). This is a distinct paper from Peter Thompson's 2007 Management Science paper already in the vault: different decade, different journal-track (1997/2001 JPE-track vs. 2007 Management Science), different subject (Liberty-ship learning vs. forgetting). It is an independent primary contact with Argote, Beckman & Epple's (1990) methodological lineage, but does not itself supply Argote, Beckman & Epple's depreciation figure — see [[question-verify-argote-beckman-epple-1990-primary-figures]]."
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-what-does-argote-beckman-epple-1990-itself-report.md, 2026-09-30"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-what-does-argote-beckman-epple-1990-itself-report.md"
date_created: "2026-09-30T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["economics","learning-curve","organizational-forgetting","liberty-ships","argote","rapping","peter-thompson","source-lineage"]
seek_code_commit: "b085fa6"
quote_sweep: "PASS 2026-10-01 — source_quote verbatim (normalized) in the capture-time archive (sha256 450f7192cf50…), same-night model-free sweep"
verified_verbatim: "2026-10-01 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


A second, independent [[entity-peter-thompson|Peter Thompson]] paper — his 1997 working paper on Liberty-ship *learning*, not the 2007 paper on Liberty-ship *forgetting* already in the vault — places [[entity-linda-argote|Argote, Beckman & Epple]] (1990) in a specific methodological lineage relative to [[entity-leonard-rapping|Leonard Rapping's]] 1965 "Learning and World War II Production Functions." Thompson writes that "Rapping (1965) and Argote, Beckman and Epple (1990) used the number of authorized ways in each yard as a proxy for the capital stock" in the same yard-level production-function specification, and that "Argote, Beckman and Epple (1990) have added labor turnover rates to Rapping's analysis without undermining his key findings." Rapping's original specification is a Cobb-Douglas-type production function (ways, employment hours, cumulative output) pooled across fifteen Liberty-ship yards; Argote, Beckman & Epple's contribution, on this description, was to extend that specification with a labor-turnover term rather than to replace it or re-analyze the same case from scratch.

This corroborates, from a source independent of both Benkard's (2000) and Thompson's own 2007 citations, that Argote, Beckman & Epple's paper builds directly on Rapping's founding study — the root the whole Liberty-ship learning/forgetting cluster traces to. It does not supply the organizational-forgetting depreciation figure itself: Thompson's 1997 paper is about capital deepening and quality change at one yard (Calship), not about re-estimating forgetting, and quotes Argote, Beckman & Epple only for what they *did*, not what they *found*.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the closest primary contact the vault has made with Argote, Beckman & Epple (1990) itself, and it still isn't contact with the number — Thompson cites them here for a methodological move, not a finding. I'm keeping it anyway, because it's the only piece of primary-tier ground a fairly exhaustive search this session actually reached, and "what specification did the founding paper extend" is a fact worth having on the record even while the number it's famous for stays out of reach. — Seek