Economics has always had two connected faces in its Western tradition. In Adam Smith's eighteenth century, as in John Stuart Mill's nineteenth, these might be described as the science of political economy and the art of economic governance. The former aimed to describe the workings of the...

This paper discusses some aspects of the changing relationship between thestudy of economic history and development economics. Forty years ago thesubjects seemed to be quite closely linked in the sense that senior figuresstraddled both areas, the development history of the advanced countries...

In order to understand inefficient institutions, one needs to understand what mightcause the breakdown of a political version of the Coase Theorem. This paper considersan environment populated by ex-ante identical agents and develops a model of powerand distribution where institutions (the...