This is a comment on ’Towards a legal theory of finance’ by Katharina Pistor. It notes that both law and money are complex and controversial phenomena. They have to be treated as historically specific institutions that arise in the context of fundamental uncertainty. The historical origins...

We examine an aspect of the argument of Teppo Felin and Nicolai Foss (‘The Endogenous Origins of Experience, Routines, and Organizational Capabilities: The Poverty of Stimulus’; 2011) where they reject the claim of Geoffrey Hodgson and Thorbjørn Knudsen (‘Darwinism, Causality and the...

This article discusses the limits of a purely transaction cost explanation of the existence of the firm by pointing to additional factors. A simple heuristic model shows that firm-specific learning effects can overcome the costs of monitoring employees, and explain the existence of the firm even...

The three core Darwinian principles of variety, inheritance and selection are found in Nelson and Winter?'s Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change (1982). Is the application of these core Darwinian principles purely analogical, or does it also relate to ontological communalities between social...

There has been a remarkable growth in evolutionary economics since the 1980s. But despite this outward success there has been inner disagreement on fundamental issues including the building blocks of evolutionary theory and the very meaning of ‘evolution’ itself. This essay provides a...

How can evolutionary ideas be applied to the study of social and political institutions? Charles Darwin identified the mechanisms of variation, selection and retention. He emphasized that evolutionary change depends on the uniqueness of every individual and its interactions within a population...

This book is based on the premise that mainstream economics has become excessively specialized and formalized, entering a state of de facto withdrawal from the study of the economy in favour of exercises in applied mathematics. The editors believe that there is much scope for synergies by...

In the 1990s, institutional and evolutionary economics emerged as one of the most creative and successful approaches in the modern social sciences. This timely reader gathers together seminal contributions from leading international authors in the field of institutional and evolutionary...