Examines the role that institutions, defined as the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction, play in economic performance and how those institutions change and how a model of dynamic institutions explains the differential performance of economies through time. Institutions are...

Improving our understanding of the nature of economic change entails that we draw on the only laboratory that we have--the past. But "understanding" the past entails imposing order on the myriad facts that have survived to explain what has happened--that is theory. To begin we need to assess...

In this article, we provide a broad overview of the interplay among cognition, belief systems, and institutions, and how they affect economic performance. We argue that a deeper understanding of institutions' emergence, their working properties, and their effect on economic and political...

The neo-classical approach to analyzing the performance of an economy assumes that in the face of pervasive scarcity individuals make choices reflecting a set of desires, wants or preferences. But valuable as this model has been for the development of an elegant body of theory it is a very...

In this essay I would like to apply the new institutional economics to suggest modifications of the theory we employ in economics to make that theory useful for the study of the performance of economies through time. The modifications I shall suggest are in the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter

In an earlier essay (North, 1981, Ch. 3) I developed a Neo-Classical Theory of the State. This essay elaborates, extends and modifies that essay in three directions: 1. It incorporates time into the model; 2. It is explicitly concerned with the perceptions - the belief systems - that determine...