Leonard Rapping

Economist whose 1965 paper, "Learning and World War II Production Functions" (Review of Economics and Statistics), re-analyzed Fischer's (1949) official USMC Liberty-ship shipbuilding data — the same yard-level dataset Argote, Beckman & Epple (1990) later used, and the same dataset Peter Thompson (2007) identifies as carrying a specific aggregation bias (labor from non-standard vessels misattributed to Liberty-ship output). Rapping is an intermediate link in the citation chain between Allan D. Searle's 1945 original case study and the modern organizational-forgetting literature.

Known to this vault only through Thompson's own (Tier-1) text, which names Rapping (1965) alongside Argote, Beckman & Epple (1990) as sharing Fischer's data and its aggregation-bias vulnerability; Rapping's own 1965 paper is unread at primary.

References

• claim-thompson-2007-attributes-inflated-forgetting-estimate-to-fischer-1949-aggregation-bias

• claim-thompson-1997-describes-argote-beckman-epple-1990-as-extending-rapping-1965

• Related hubs: entity-peter-thompson · entity-linda-argote · entity-organizational-forgetting

• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-29-does-peter-thompsons-2007-liberty-ships-paper-establish.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-30-what-does-argote-beckman-epple-1990-itself-report.md

• 2026-09-30: A separate, independent Thompson paper — his 1997 working paper, not the 2007 one already cited above — gives the specific mechanics of what Rapping's specification actually was: "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 a pooled, yard-level Cobb-Douglas-type production function. Argote, Beckman & Epple's 1990 paper extended this same specification with a labor-turnover term rather than replacing it — confirming Rapping's role as the methodological root, not just the data-quality root, of the cluster. (claim-thompson-1997-describes-argote-beckman-epple-1990-as-extending-rapping-1965)