The increasing gap between the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CE & EE) with regard to both their economic and political performance cannot be explained by their different starting conditions after the breakdown of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is due to cultural...

The increasing gap between the formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CE & EE) with regard to both their economic and political performance cannot be explained by their different starting conditions after the breakdown of the Soviet Union alone. Rather, it is due to cultural...

China's transition to a market economy has been a process of basic institutional changes and institution building. The institutional change from a socialist labour regime (SLR) as one of the backbones upholding the traditional leninist system to a new 'socialist' market labour regime (SMLR)...

In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political...

In a series of recent papers, Mark Roe and Lucian Bebchuk have developed further the concept of path dependence, combined it with concepts of evolution and used it to challenge the wide-spread view that the corporate governance systems of the major advanced economies are likely to converge...

The expansion of welfare-state arrangements is seen as the result of dynamic interaction between market behaviour and political behaviour, often with considerable time lags, sometimes generating either virtuous or vicious circles. Such interaction may also involve induced (endogenous) changes in...

Despite the advances in New Institutional Economics about the economic consequences of institutions and legal rules, up to now we have only limited knowledge about the mechanisms of the evolution of law. By combining the main ideas of Evolutionary Economics and New Institutional Economics this...

Germany's social security system is surveyed, its benefits and contributions are discussed. The expansion of this system in the last decades is described, its impact on employment and growth is studied and proposals for the reform of the system are discussed.