Technology is a complex adaptive system that is both shaped by, and shapes, institutional arrangements. This critical insight, developed in depth by W. Brian Arthur – the father of complexity economics – is relevant to researchers interested in institutions. Arthur provides a method for capturing the underlying dynamics. He offers conceptual tools centred on the concept of increasing returns to make sense of some crucial challenges. He also suggests technical tools, including agent-based modelling, to tackle ill-defined economic, legal, and institutional problems. This article explores his body of work and derives some institutional insights from it.

The economic crisis experienced by many developed countries over the past decade saw the emergence of the phenomenon of so-called recovered firms (RFs), or employee buyouts of failed capitalist firms (CFs). While it is obvious that one of the objectives sought by these workers is to keep their jobs, the subsequent performance of these firms is unclear. Are RFs more likely to fail than other worker managed firms (WMFs) or than CFs? Do RF workers get higher incomes than their peers in other WMFs or in CFs? This analysis is based on a linked employer–employee panel data set from Uruguayan social security administrative records. The main findings are that RFs survive longer than other WMFs or than CFs. However, RF workers receive incomes lower than those of their peers at other WMFs or at CFs. This income differential is explained partly by a brain drain process and specific human capital losses.

This paper reveals a novel and perhaps surprising ingredient in the mix of influences that inspired and informed the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom on self-governance: cybernetics, understood as a theory of control via feedback mechanisms. Based on this crucial insight, the paper portrays self-governance as involving an architecture of multiple levels of so-called ‘second order’ feedback mechanisms. Such compounded systems of organization are the key to understanding any self-governance process and the paper argues that their intrinsic logic provides a critical link between the work of the Ostroms and the public choice and constitutional political economy perspectives on institutional order. The paper thereby offers both a fresh perspective on the Ostromian view of self-governance and also of also of governance theory in general.

This empirical study extends the public choice literature on the allocation of death during war by examining the political economy of foreign fighter deaths in the Russo-Ukrainian War since the 24 February 2022 invasion. The study explores the roles played by various demographic factors, military institutions, and international trade relations in determining the number of foreign fighters from a variety of countries who have died in support of either Ukraine or Russia during the Russo-Ukrainian War. Unlike other related studies, this study also investigates the importance of, and finds evidence in support of, both economic freedom and a robust democracy in shaping the choices made by individuals around the globe to venture to, and die fighting on, the battlefields of Ukraine.

Academic freedom is a cornerstone of modern academic life. It is not only implied by basic liberal principles but also contributes to scientific progress and economic growth. It is therefore important to better understand what affects how free scholarly pursuits are, and to that end, we ask whether economic freedom can help explain variation in academic freedom across countries. In our case, relating the Economic Freedom of the World index and its five areas to V-Dem's index of academic freedom and its five areas reveals that the rule of law is positively and robustly related to academic freedom in all its forms. This suggests that the rule of law, in its general and broad sense, can arguably serve as a guarantor of academic freedom. Where the rule of law is weakened, academic freedom can be at risk. There are some indications that regulatory freedom is similarly related to academic freedom, but less robustly so, maybe indicating that interventionism in one policy area (economics) can breed interventionism in another (academia).

Conflicts over resources with poorly defined property rights have fuelled both deforestation and violence in the Brazilian Amazon. However, what happens when the State enhances its ability to monitor and enforce existing environmental laws? We study the case of the list of Municípios Prioritários, a policy that allocates additional resources to verify compliance with environmental laws in municipalities with high deforestation rates. Employing a difference-in-differences approach, our findings suggest that an improvement in the ability of the State to monitor and enforce environmental laws can reduce conflicts over the appropriation of value from resources with poorly defined property rights. Consistent with existing studies, we also find that the policy led to a reduction in deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current approach to curb violence in a region where the activity of mafias has considerably grown since the turn of the twenty-first century.

In the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, there is a pronounced paradigm shift associated with the transition from internalism to externalism. The externalist paradigm views cognitive processes as not isolated in the brain, but as interrelated with external artefacts and structures. The paper focuses on one of the leading externalist approaches – extended cognition. Despite the dominance of internalism in economics, in its main schools, there is an emerging trend towards extended cognition ideas. In my opinion, economists might develop the most advanced version of the extended cognition approach: socially extended cognition based on cognitive institutions. This paper analyses extended cognition ideas in institutional, Austrian, and behavioural economics and identifies numerous overlapping approaches and complementary research areas. I argue that the economics of cognitive institutions is a promising field for all economic schools and propose a preliminary research agenda.

This paper investigates the nexus between per capita income convergence and political institutions within the Eurozone. Employing data spanning the years 2002–2019, the research initially identifies multiple convergence clusters and subsequently examines the relationship between the creation of these clusters and different aspects of political institutions. The findings reveal that there are multiple steady states in the Eurozone, and their formation is notably influenced by political institutions alongside other conventional economic determinants derived from the Solow model. Furthermore, the study underscores that improvements in regulatory quality, as well as in aspects such as democracy, government effectiveness, and corruption control, positively impact income convergence across all member countries. These findings carry significant policy implications.

This paper analyses the institutional incentives and constraints of the Black Mouth Society – the traditional police of the pre-colonial Mandan and Hidatsa tribes – to understand how it successfully maintained social order without abusing power. The Black Mouth Society was a fraternal organization of middle-aged men that monitored and enforced rules created by the village council and chiefs. Two categories of institutions ensured reliable policing. First, on the front end, a long probationary period and system of unanimous consent facilitated the selection of reputable men who would wield policing power responsibly, reducing the chance of predation. However, individual Black Mouths occasionally abused their power. Therefore, on the back end, public communication created common knowledge, leading to social sanctions in the form of shame and restitution that punished abuses and limited further abuse. Thus, well-functioning self-governance, including reliable policing, is possible without a centralized state, as these tribes have demonstrated.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the Chinese government's effort to promote global development and interconnectivity through a vast network of transportation, energy, and telecommunications infrastructure projects. Involving over 140 countries, Beijing has clearly stated aims and methods for the Belt and Road, including that BRI contributes to economic development in participant countries and that all projects be carried out according to ‘five cooperation priorities’ representing win–win partnerships between China and BRI-participant countries. Taking China's stated aims as given, this paper argues that Beijing faces information and institutional constraints that prevent the successful planning, implementation, and operation of BRI. By employing ill-suited means to achieve their stated ends, Beijing undermines their own ability to carry out BRI successfully. This paper explores the mechanisms at work on the ground within BRI, utilizing case studies of BRI's flagship projects and BRI contract data as evidence for the theory.

Co-management regimes are institutional innovations that hold the promise of achieving sustainable common-pool resource governance. However, the transition to such institutional regimes in coastal resource systems has faced challenges in many countries. This article examines the processes and outcomes of such institutional changes in coastal fisheries in Ghana, where the transition to co-management was unsuccessful. Combining theoretical perspectives from legal pluralism in legal anthropology and ideational theories of institutional change within institutional economics, the paper uses process tracing to examine the role of ideology and historical institutional dynamics of the resource context in the institutionalization and failure of co-management arrangements for governing coastal fisheries. The study finds that ideological conflicts and historical legacies of legal pluralism hindered the practice and outcomes of coastal fisheries co-management in Ghana. The article argues for particular attention to the historical institutional dimensions and underlying worldviews of the resource context in institutional interventions for sustainability in coastal resource systems.

Although crises provide an opportunity for meaningful institutional change, the results often fall short of expectations because the reforms undertaken are informed by top-down, global-standard blueprints and fail to consider the informal, long-established, functionally credible institutions that exist at the local level. Seeking to explore how the interplay between formal and informal institutions can affect institutional change, the study focuses on Stagiates, a small community that has been struggling for more than 10 years against the uniform implementation of the 2010 administrative reform (prescribed in light of the Greek government-debt crisis), which threatens to dismantle their 350-year-old, functionally credible commons. To this end, the paper uses case study methodology, Historical-Institutional Analysis and Ostrom's Social-Ecological System framework. It concludes by emphasising the need for institutional analysis and policy to look more closely at the dynamic and complex dialectic between formal and informal institutions and the role that community needs, norms and values play in meaningful institutional change, paying due attention (as original institutionalism did) to the informality and the function-based social credibility of institutions.

Economic studies of religion tend to focus on religious affiliation and attendance at religious services to the exclusion of other dimensions of religion, including religious belief. We address this lacuna, using data from the World Values Survey to construct an index of religious beliefs based on whether an individual believes in God, heaven, hell, an immortal soul, and the afterlife. Following the approach in a seminal article, we compare the roles of religious beliefs and attendance in determining economic values related to cooperation, patriarchy, institutional trust, lawfulness, thrift, markets, and market fairness. Controlling for denominational, country and period fixed effects and a set of individual-level characteristics, we find that religious beliefs matter for six of these seven values, relative to five for attendance. In addition, beliefs are more important than attendance for promarket and patriarchal values and less important for thrift, market fairness, lawfulness, and institutional trust. We also consider the relationships between beliefs, attendance, and economic values for eight religious’ affiliations: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, other religions, and non-religious. Taken together, beliefs and attendance are most important for patriarchal values, promarket attitudes, lawfulness, and institutional trust. Relative to attendance, beliefs matter most for patriarchal attitudes and least for institutional trust. Our results suggest that religious beliefs constitute an important dimension of religious life. An exclusive focus on attendance may understate the role of religion in economic values.

In recent times, the economic and social relevance of constitutions and potential determinants of their validity have been increasingly debated. However, we still know little about the relationships between the text of a constitution and constitutional compliance. Does the wording of a constitution matter in this context? In this paper, drawing on a sample of democratic countries, we apply econometric and machine learning tools to provide some insights on these issues. The results suggest that shorter texts and placing more emphasis on punishments for transgressions seem to be positively correlated with the compliance level. Regarding the precision of constitutional text, in turn, we find mixed evidence. Econometric modelling suggests no statistically significant relationship with constitutional compliance, and machine learning models instead indicate this feature as a potentially important determinant of constitutional compliance.

This article is about a partially untold story: the central role played by intermediate or ‘meso’ institutions in urban water supply. Three central functions are identified: translating policies and laws into operational targets; monitoring; and incentivizing operators. This paper considers which aspects of institutional design and capacity allow meso-institutions to perform these functions successfully, and conversely what constrains them from doing so. It explores this issue through a careful examination of urban water provision in seven Asian cities which represent a range of macro-institutional environments and micro-institutional arrangements. The analysis shows that in many cases meso functions are performed inadequately or not at all for water supply, with negative consequences for the quality of service. This is particularly evident in cases where ownership and decision rights are not clearly defined and allocated.

Although Lippmann's The Good Society was written to address the crisis in liberal democracies in the 1930s, we argue that it offers a novel and plausible institutionalist account of the productivity slowdown and the increase in the experience of insecurity that has characterised most liberal democracies over the last 20–40 years. Central to Lippmann's account is a Smithian-institutionalist model of growth where property rights have to evolve both to encourage continued levels of risk taking in the face of new uncertainties and also to offset new sources of unequal bargaining power that the very process of growth itself creates. When property rights fossilise and fail to evolve, as in the 1930s and plausibly also now, productivity growth slows down, insecurity rises, and illiberal political creeds prosper. To avoid this, Lippmann's analysis suggests that property rights have to change to re-energise risk taking and to offset the new sources of unequal bargaining power. For example, in current circumstances, new ‘positive’ property rights arising from the development of social insurance might encourage risk taking and new ‘negative’ property rights in personal data might help offset the new sources of unequal bargaining power that have emerged.

Collusive agreements in the form of corporate cartels are complex structures. The involved firms need to agree on terms that are legally not enforceable. However, the interplay between the involved firms in a collusive agreement, i.e., the governance dimension within a cartel, has received surprisingly low attention. Using a comprehensive OECD dataset of 191 cartels from 2012 to 2018, this paper empirically demonstrates how polycentric governance within a cartel may possibly contribute to understanding its stability. It may be beneficial for the duration and lower sanctions imposed by competition authorities, especially for large cartels. By that, the paper sheds new light on two aspects: the entangled governance structures of corporate cartels and the relevance of the concept of polycentricity beyond public administration.

This article compares Habraken's Open-Building framework to Ostrom's design principles. While both frameworks aim to create adaptable and self-governing environments, Ostrom focuses on long-lasting commons governance, while Habraken focuses on designing for change. Unlike Ostrom, Habraken focuses on excludability, implying that private spaces include private and club goods, and public spaces combine public goods and common-pool resources. For Habraken, space is public to people from lower levels who have the right to enter but is private to people from higher levels who can only enter as guests. Habraken also focuses on separating design tasks, such as putting utilities in public spaces accessible from apartment building corridors, to reduce maintenance and repair costs. Utility access from public areas also reduces the need for temporary management and access rights from neighbouring territories, changing many repair and maintenance decisions from collective to private choices. Separating the infill level from the base building gives agents on the lower levels greater ability to adapt and control their own environments. Habraken views the built environment as a self-organizing polycentric system, and an important part of self-organization is appropriately applying themes, patterns, types, and systems. Unlike Ostrom, Habraken doesn't think there are focal action situations.

Applying the framework of North et al. (2009, Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), this paper analyses institutional and economic development in a new setting – the Grand Duchy of Lithuania between 1245 and 1386. Although remaining a fragile limited access order, Lithuania achieved positive institutional change. Its elite became more stable by restricting ruling privileges to the grand duke's family and integrating rival dukes through administrative positions and hereditary property rights. This arrangement encouraged land accumulation and productive activity over extraction, while the elite started providing better security to traders and craftsmen seeking to finance its war against the Teutonic Order. Synthesised material evidence reflects development at the extensive margin. However, health data shows no increase in average living standards, potentially due to population growth and inequality. Both sets of findings are consistent with the conceptual framework, as it expects fragile limited access orders to be underdeveloped from a static perspective, but improve following institutional development.