The paper examines different types of financial organization in a framework of incomplete law, under which the rights and the duties of the individuals are not completely specified. It focuses on the relationship between finance and specificity arguing that, while financial structure influences...

People consume because others consume, maintained Veblen in 1899. More recently, theoretical, empirical and experimental articles have argued that people constantly compare themselves to their environments and care greatly about their relative positions.Given that competition for positions may...

In this paper we investigate a rationale for co-evolution of financial and technological structures in modern firms according to the Comparative Institutional Analysis Approach (CIA). Starting from the 'Transaction Costs Approach' (TCE) to the analysis of the relationship between corporate...

As Hodgson has nicely pointed out, capitalism can be only understood if we accept that, unlike possession, property is a social construction and a relation among individuals. Unlike possession, property does not require a material thing on which it should be applied. Property rights can create...

For a long time family capitalism has been considered to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of the Italian economy. In Italy also large business organizations rely very often on this form of corporate governance. This paper examines both the actual institutional shocks and the missed...

After the first section, introducing some typical problems of family capitalism, the following three sections of the paper consider the ambiguity of the legal framework defining the modern corporation, the two way relation between technology and property rights and the different mechanisms by...

National economies used to be characterised by cultural standardisation and social protection. Globalisation pushes cultural standardisation beyond the boundaries of national states and induces a global dilution of the standards of social protection. At the same time, if national economies...

Most pre-crisis explanations of the various corporate governance systems have considered the separation between ownership and control to be an advantage of the Anglo-American economies. They have also attributed the failure of other countries to achieve these efficient arrangements to their...

The purpose of this short reply is to consider the issue of the evolution of the exceptional human intellectual capabilities which has been the focus of the majority of the comments to my article “love, war and culture: an institutional approach to human evolution” all published in the April...