Modern theory identifies several sources of economic growth, such as capital accumulation, new techniques, secure property rights and contracts, and absence of rent seeking. This paper introduces new social technologies as yet another source of growth and emphasizes our incomplete knowledge of social systems. I introduce a framework for analyzing institutional policy and use the case of modern biotechnology to explain how uncertainty about social technologies, persuasion, and competing beliefs influence the evolution of property rights.

This paper argues that technological advance is a necessary condition for sustained economic growth. Technologies and institutions co-evolve in a system of mutual causation. Although some institutions inhibit growth while others encourage it, no single institution is either necessary or sufficient to produce sustained growth. However, some non-unique bundle of encouraging institutions is necessary. Sustained growth began with the Industrial Revolutions that did not just ‘fall out of the blue’ but were instead the culmination of three trajectories of technological advance in steam power, electric power, and the mechanization of textile manufacturing. These stretched over several centuries. Growth then became sustained when the West ‘invented how to invent’. A necessary condition for the Industrial Revolutions was Western science whose roots lie as far back as the scholastic philosophers and the medieval universities. Its absence elsewhere is a sufficient reason why no other place developed its own indigenous industrial revolution.

Reconstruction involves military occupation with the aim of rebuilding and reforming both formal and informal institutions along liberal democratic lines. We contend that successful reconstructions require mechanisms that make reforms credible over the long run. In the absence of a signal of sustained credible commitment, institutional reforms will not be trusted by the populace resulting in the failure of the broader reconstruction. The incentive and epistemic aspects of the credible commitment problem are analyzed. We also consider potential solutions to the problem of credible commitment. Absent such solutions, attempts to ‘export’ institutions via military occupation will fail or produce dysfunctional outcomes. An analysis of the numerous aspects of the credibility problem in the current reconstruction of Iraq is provided to illuminate the central arguments.

According to the dominant ‘nexus of contracts’ and ‘collection of assets’ views of the firm, the firm is a either a fiction or an aggregate. Although legal personality is important in both accounts, everything is said to be achieved by private contract alone and the law's role in creating legal entity status is dismissed. The paper challenges both these aspects by reconsidering an alternative ‘real entity theory’ that dominated debates at the turn of the twentieth century. This forgotten view holds that the firm is neither a fiction nor an aggregate but a real entity, and underlines the creation of legal entity status as a fundamental role of the law. The paper discusses this view's ontological and legal insights, clarifies the proposition that the firm is a real entity, and proposes it as a starting point for a theory of the firm.

This article compares a variety of theoretical approaches to conceptualizing institutional change. Our goal is neither to discover the ‘best’ theory, nor to attempt to build a new one. Rather, we wish to compare how the theories we consider agree or differ with respect to the causes, process, and outcomes of institutional change. Some of the theories we discuss emphasize the deliberate creation of institutions through the political process, while others emphasize the spontaneous emergence of institutions through evolutionary processes. Still others combine elements of evolution and design. We differentiate a variety of approaches to conceptualizing the interaction between formal and informal rules. We discuss recent theories based on the ‘Equilibrium View’ of institutions, and theories emphasizing the role of habit, learning, and bounded rationality. We also consider theoretical explanations for institutional inertia and path-dependence.

We examine the origin and methodology of a ‘New New Institutional Economics’ (NNIE) – an emerging research agenda distinguished by its attempt to account for the role of institutions in complex socio-economic change by formally modeling institutions as the background conditions to parameterized cost–benefit calculations. The NNIE expands the application of economic modeling tools to new areas of inquiry, models institutional outcomes with parsimony and mathematical rigor, and introduces political and economic power, thereby allowing for consideration of institutional change that is not Pareto improving. Using a four-part analytical framework, we find that the explanatory power of NNIE analysis derives not from its formal models, but from a more vague, nuanced, and narrative version of the formal models, which we call ‘Quasi-Models’. We find that the NNIE's formal models are too parsimonious to meaningfully illuminate the complex institutions they ostensibly represent.

This paper provides an empirical analysis linking two theories of firms' strategic behavior. We analyze corporate strategies in the emerging global market for liquefied natural gas. First, following Porter, we identify three strategic target market positions: chain optimization, flexibility strategy, and national oil companies (NOCs). Each target market position is supported by an underlying resource profile. Second, following transaction cost economics, we hypothesize that specific investments under uncertainty provide incentives to integrate vertically. We test these economic relationships empirically applying a two-stage procedure. Estimation results show that the three strategic choices of target market position, resource profile, and organizational structure are interrelated. We show that NOCs rely on less idiosyncratic assets than companies following a flexibility strategy and companies following a flexibility strategy rely on less idiosyncratic assets than chain optimizers. An increase in hold-up potential results in a higher probability of a firm organizing transactions within its own hierarchy.

The development of the American economy was accompanied by significant spatial income inequalities between the northern and southern regions. While many factors contributed to northern industrialization and southern stagnation, an important factor was differences in the region's institutions. In the North, a democratic institution fostered growth whereas in the South, oligarchic institutions favored status quo. To gain insights on the nature and causes of this divergence, this paper examines the development of political and legal institutions in Massachusetts and Virginia, the two leading states in the North and the South.

This paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of cooperation in productive ventures, conceived of as collective action endeavours that require cooperation rather than mere coordination. It is argued that cooperative behaviour is grounded on three kinds of ‘common goods’, defined as goods that are shared and recognized as beneficial by the workers. These comprise common goals, relational satisfaction, and moral norms and values. The commonly held goods are associated with motives and behavioural rules which constitute both the reasons for cooperating and the means through which the dilemmatic nature of cooperation is overcome. It is further argued that the binding character of these rules is closely linked to humans’ ability and opportunity to communicate. Normative guidelines relative to management practices and directions for future research are also derived.

The sharp division between the ‘institutions view’ and the ‘disease view’ has been one of the distinctive features of the ‘root causes of economic progress’ literature. Based on evidence from cross-national data, the ‘institutions school’ claims that institutions are the only root cause of development, whereas the ‘disease school’ claims that diseases are also equally important. In this paper, I contribute to this literature by proposing a unified structure to marry the two conflicting views. I argue that overcoming diseases are of prime importance at an early stage of economic development, whereas institutions are more important at a later stage. I find support for this hypothesis in the development history literature on Africa, India, China and the Americas.

In Douglass C. North's works on institutional change, his focus shifted from formal institutions and highly rational actors to the links between culture, cognition, and the evolution of institutions. This has led to a corresponding shift in his basic explanation of institutional change: In his earlier works, institutional change is mainly caused by actions of highly rational utility-maximizing political actors. In his later works, the evolution of a society's institutions is above all a function of changes in the dominant belief system. The paper tries to contribute to the obvious task of bringing these two explanations of institutional change together. My synthetic approach rests basically on a Northian framework supplemented with three further elements: firstly, with the idea of the transfer of institutions; secondly, with the concept of functional differentiation; and, thirdly, and decisively, with an understanding of culture as a toolkit, leaving room for interest, choice, and strategic action.

This paper uses an augmented Feldstein–Horioka savings–investment methodology to examine the impact of institutional quality on the degree of capital mobility in developing countries. A high correlation between domestic investment and domestic savings can arise from the presence of institutional rigidities restricting the movement of capital across borders. We find that including different aspects of institutional quality raises the coefficient of the savings rate, implying lower capital mobility. However, the improvement in institutional quality that strengthens the legal system, reduces investment risks, and ensures democratic accountability, increases capital mobility in developing countries. Inclusion of foreign aid also has a positive impact on the coefficient of the savings rate.

This paper offers a critique of the ‘ontology of evolutionary realism’ proposed in Kurt Dopfer and Jason Potts’ recent General Theory of Economic Evolution, concentrating particularly on their treatment of social rules.

Coase originally formulated his conjecture about intertemporal price competition in an example of land monopoly, but it has been applied almost exclusively to non-spatial markets. This paper revisits the Coase conjecture and compares four institutional arrangements based on the combination of land tenure options and local governance forms: private/rental, public/rental, private/owner, and public/owner. The two-period model developed in this paper shows that homeownership may result in more land development than leasehold. Numeric examples suggest (1) public/owner is efficient for uniform distribution of consumer; (2) rentals can be desirable for ‘poor’ communities; (3) private/owner is more efficient for ‘rich’ communities; (4) restrictive zoning reduces social surplus. These results can help explain why public institutions are dominant in the urban area and why most private communities are small, located in the suburbs, and for middle-upper class.

Secure property rights, established through court enforcement of contracts, are widely acknowledged to be fundamental to economic exchange. Despite their essential function, weak legal and judicial institutions remain the norm across much of Eastern European and former Soviet Union. Barzel (2002) hypothesizes that the value of contract trade, as opposed to relationships and reputation, increases as products travel further and are more costly to inspect. Combining Barzel's theory with the high cost of searching for foreign buyers (Rauch, 1999), this article presents evidence that international trade played a significant role in the emergence of institutions. Search costs influence the potential to export value-added, or complex, products. The level of potential complex exports in turn influences the intensity with which businesses lobby for more credible legal and juridical institutions. Both a micro-level model and empirical evidence provide evidence consistent with an endogenous link between exports and legal and judicial institutions.

One hundred years ago, Thorstein Veblen (1909b) published what is one of his most important journal articles. In ‘The Limitations of Marginal Utility’, he not only developed his critique of neoclassical economics, but also expanded his own methodological outlook.

Adam Smith (1982) undertook a momentous project in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS): He wanted to debunk the Cartesian dichotomy between the emotions (body) and rationality (mind). The debunking of the body/mind dichotomy is a major aim of many modern neuroscientists and neuroeconomists (e.g., Damasio, 1994; Glimcher, 2004; Rustichini, 2005). Smith also wanted to demonstrate that morality is grounded on the emotions – as the title of his book indicates. So for Smith, the twin pillars of what thinkers consider to be distinguishably human, namely, rationality and morality, are actually rooted in the emotions (body). More specifically, while rationality and morality are based on the emotions, Smith showed that the emotions are rather refined and sophisticated sentiments adopted by agents in light of how they judge the actions of others and, in turn, how they should judge their own actions. Such judgments are nothing but the determination of what is the rational (optimal) solution. So, sentiments are not hurdles in the pathway of rational decisions. They are rather the building blocks of such decisions.

This relatively unknown and seldom cited text by the great American institutional economist John R. Commons if of interest not merely because of the issues mentioned in its title. It also illuminates Commons's analysis of custom, law, and the state. This introduction gives some biographical details and discusses some of the important features of this essay.