In this essay I argue that it is the way institutions evolve that shapes long run economic performance. By institutions I mean formal rules--political and economic-- and informal constraints--such as conventions and norms of behavior as well as the characteristics of enforcement of both. To be...

The argument of this essay is that productivity increases result from both improvements in human organization and from technological developments. Indeed it is probably true that the former is as important as the latter in economic growth. In the following sections I first lay out the...

In this landmark work, a Nobel Prize-winning economist develops a new way of understanding the process by which economies change. Douglass North inspired a revolution in economic history a generation ago by demonstrating that economic performance is determined largely by the kind and quality of...

This essay first specifies and describes the behavioral and information cost assumptions that underlie instrumental rationality and the consequent a-institutional world of neoclassical theory and contrasts these assumptions to those that underpin a theory of institutions and transaction costs....