This chapter summarizes the case for considering money as a legal institution. The Western liberal tradition, represented here by John Locke’s iconic account of money, describes money as an item that emerged from barter before the state existed. Considered as an historical practice, money is...

Ronald Coase merged two traditions in economics, marginalism and institutionalism. Neoclassical economics in the 1930s was characterized by an abstract conception of marginalism and frictionless resource movement. Marginal analysis did not seek to uncover the source of individual human...

Human beings increase their productivity by specializing their resources and exchanging their products. The organization of exchange is costly, however, because specialized activities need coordination and incentives have to be aligned. This work first describes how these exchanges are organized...

This work first describes how exchange is organized in an institutional environment with laws, courts and markets focusing on the dual effect of this environment. Institutions enjoy specialization advantages in safeguarding exchange but they also make possible new forms of opportunism, causing...

While initially heralded as the magic bullet for development, NGOs have come under increasing criticism for their failure to deliver development as promised. Despite the plethora of new critiques, little systematic work has theorized how NGOs actually operate within the least developed countries...

How and why does distant political and economic history shape the functioning of current institutions? This paper argues that individual values and convictions about the scope of application of norms of good conduct provide the missing link. Evidence from a variety of sources points to two main...

This article is the introductory chapter to a festschrift in honour of Geoff Hodgson. In work spanning four decades, Geoff Hodgson has made many path-breaking contributions to institutional economics, evolutionary economics, economic methodology, the history of economic thought and social theory...