During the last phase of state socialism, the economic reforms attempted by these counties didn't stop the collapse of communism. Neither did the free market economic reforms in the democratic West starting around 1975 bring progress and prosperity expected. The frustrations of both these...

How do ideas evolve? Can one speak of scientific progress when there is more than one pathway of intellectual evolution in which different ideas emerge and flow in different directions? Is the history of economic analysis a compilation of a number of intellectual pathways? This essay argues that...

Taking stock of the main approaches to explaining institutional change and its relationship with economic development, this paper proposes an original formal framework to analyze institutional evolution. Institutions have formal (F) and informal (N) aspects that may evolve at different paces,...

This paper explores the problem of credible commitment that public officials face with regard to institutional reform. Doug North points out that while economies grow as a result of the provision of governance, I argue that creating an entity with a geographic monopoly simultaneously limits the...

This Special Section builds on cutting edge developments in the literature on institutional change and its link to economic development and throws fresh light on this link from both a microeconomic (firm and household level) and a macroeconomic (country and cross country level) perspective. The...

We propose an Institutional Presence (IP) measure to capture the latent role of non-owner institutional investors who nevertheless may be observing a firm. We employ this measure to examine whether the ‘presence' of institutional investors reduces information asymmetry in the market. Firms in...