Our theory of cultural-institutional persistence and innovation is based on uncoordinated updating of individual social norms and contracts, so that both culture and institutions are endogenous. We explain why Pareto-dominated cultural-institutional configurations may persist over long periods...

Laws and policies designed to harness self-regarding preferences to public ends may fail when they compromise the beneficial effects of pro-social preferences. Experimental evidence indicates that incentives that appeal to self interest may reduce the salience of intrinsic motivation,...

David Gordon was a pioneer in the burgeoning field of institutional growth economics, introducing the concept of a ‘social structure of accumulation’, and richly illustrating its usefulness with both econometric and historical studies. Gordon also helped to develop the theory of segmented...

These two volumes collect some of the principal articles that have contributed to the renewal and development of radical political economy during the past generation. Radical Political Economy draws upon Marxian, institutional and Keynesian perspectives to construct a new and comprehensive...

We survey the determinants of earnings and propose a framework for understanding labor market success. We suggest that the advantages of the children of successful parents go considerably beyond the benefits of superior education, the inheritance of wealth, or the genetic inheritance of...

Recent developments in microeconomic theory have shown that the self-interested behavior underlying neoclassical theory is artificially truncated: it depicts a charmingly Victorian but Utopian world in which conflicts abound but a handshake is a handshake. But a handshake is not always a...