Legal institutions are critical for the development of market-based economies. This paper defines legal institutions and discusses different indicators to measure their quality and efficiency. It surveys a large historical and empirical literature showing the importance of legal institutions in...

Impersonal exchange has been a major driver of economic development. But transactors with no stake in maintaining an ongoing relationship have little incentive to honor deals. Therefore, all economies have developed institutions to support honest trade and realize the gains of impersonal...

The productivity slowdown in Europe since the mid-1990s is a reason for concern. Labour market rigidity, hampering innovation, may be a cause of the slowdown. In the paper this argument is placed in a broader perspective. Labour force participation is an important factor in explaining...

French liberal economists share a very surprising reading of Bentham's theory. In this paper, we underline the method according to which these French liberal economists in the nineteenth century economists understand Bentham's utilitarianism: they consider that utilitarianism deals with...

This article explains the level of economic freedom in Muslim countries through the theory of institutional path dependency. Islamic countries are generally not free and they have a poor record regarding property rights. To explain these realities we use the institutional history of Muslim...

This paper argues that mainstream economic the- ory, far from providing an indisputable plea in favor of shareholder value-maximization, o ers striking arguments showing quite the opposite: pro t maximization cannot be a legitimate prioritar- ian goal for private rms. This opens the door for a...

This paper focuses on how to deal with environmental problems, through the lenses of the New Institutional Economics. The emphasis is on the intertwined role of organizational solutions and their institutional settings. This is not to say that technological solutions to environmental problems...

The extraordinary influence of The Problem of Social Cost" is now well acknowledged. Beyond the official recognition coming with the award of the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences as well as the myriad citations, what may matter most, as emphasized by Mary Shirley (2013), is that...

This paper argues that mainstream economic theory, far from providing an indisputable plea in favor of shareholder value-maximization, offers striking arguments showing quite the opposite : profit-maximization cannot be a legitimate goal for private firms. This opens the door for a widening of a...

This article explains the level of economic freedom in Muslim countries through the theory of institutional path dependency. Islamic countries are generally not free and they have a poor record regarding property rights. To explain these realities we use the institutional history of Muslim...