Prize Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 9, 1993.

I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts - not because my family had any connection with higher education, but because my father was a manager at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in a nearby town and Cambridge was the nearest hospital - in 1920. In the ensuing years we moved a number of...

In this essay I intend to assess the road we have travelled in the ten years since the first conference on Institutional Economics with the objectives of suggesting where we should go from here. The suggestions will be personal reflecting both my special interests as an economic historian and my...

An economic definition of transaction costs are the costs of measuring what is being exchanged and enforcing agreements. In the larger context of societal evolution they are all the costs involved in human interaction over time. It is this larger context that I wish to explore in this essay. The...

I take my text from Max Hartwell: "...but no historian has detailed the steps by which for example, the market economy was achieved in terms of government action or changing law; no historian has linked mercantilist with laissez-faire law to trace the chronology of legal and economic change. In...

A central thesis of this chapter is that economic growth and the development of freedom are complementary processes of societal development. Economic growth provides the resources (and leisure) to support more complex societies; and it is unlikely to persist in the long run without the...

My assignment for this conference is to explore the relevance of "institutional competition" as a deliberate strategy in improving the competitiveness of economies. The historical record gives us a very mixed response with respect to the success of economies in deliberately altering the...