The development of academic economics in Brazil received a major boost during the 1960s, when US institutions such as USAID and the Ford Foundation began to fund the first graduate programs in the field. An important moment occurred in 1973 with the creation of ANPEC, the national association...

Metaphors are part of our daily lives as they help us understand the world. Economics, as other areas of knowledge, cannot go without metaphors. Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) – a prominent theoretical framework on economic organisation – is no different: it has been built on a set of...

Edith Penrose's "The theory of the growth of the firm" has offered key ingredients to an evolutionary approach to the growth of the firm. The entrepreneur enlivened by Edith Penrose in that book is revisited here, considering the role played by institutions in his decision-making. It is argued...

Chapter 12 of Keynes' General Theory has concepts and analytical links with strong identification with the ones used by the so-called institutional approaches. This essay highlights what seems to have been anticipated by Keynes on the research core of institutional economics, mainly based on his...

Bounded rationality, opportunism, the primacy of markets and the action of economizing are building blocks of Oliver Williamson's Transaction Cost Economics (TCE). As in all intellectual exchanges, Williamson has used a range of argumentative devices to set up and negotiate his basic notions and...