A characteristic feature of economic development is the ever changing structure of consumption patterns. Reducing the explanation of this phenomenon to changing prices, finally caused by changes in the availability of goods (or characteristics), would neglect a major force driving this change,...

This paper compares and contrasts two schools of political economy: the Austrian School, prominent members of which include Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises; and the Bloomington School, which was founded by Elinor and Vincent Ostrom. It is argued that the two traditions share a good deal in...

A characteristic feature of economic development is the ever changing structure of consumption patterns. Reducing the explanation of this phenomenon to changing prices, finally caused by changes in the availability of goods (or characteristics), would neglect a major force driving this change,...

Our contribution aims at revealing the terms of a confrontation between Austrian and Institutional schools concerning the nature and the role of markets. Such an approach is justified by, on the one hand, the characteristics shared by both theoretical traditions, and on the other by the...

Economic history has become an increasingly broad discipline, after a temporary narrowing following the cliometric revolution of the mid-twentieth century. Increasingly sophisticated econometric techniques are used to capture the institutional detail involved in the dynamics of historical...

Frank Knight’s theory of monopoly price has received relatively little attention in the literature on Risk, Uncertainty and Profit. We argue that Knight accepted and refined the monopoly price theory of Carl Menger and his followers. Knight highlights the difference between monopoly as an...

Carl Menger published his classic work Principles of Economics in 1871, that work is the founding text of what came known as the “Austrian School of Economics”. That label has now been used to describe a historical school of thought, as well as contemporary academic economists and public...

This paper explores the interface between institutional theory and Austrian theory. We examine mainstream institutionalism as exemplified by D. C. North in his work with Wallis and Weingast on the elite compact theory of social order and of transitions to impersonal rights, and propose instead...

Ludwig von Mises seems to be something of an outlier within the Austrian school when it comes to capital – though his position is clearly foreshadowed in a neglected article by Carl Menger (1888). In this paper we examine Mises's view on capital and suggest that it constitutes a bridge between...

The financial crisis of 2008 has challenged the reputation of the free-market economy in the public imagination in a way that it has not been challenged since the Great Depression. The intellectual consensus after World War II was that markets are unstable and exploitive and thus in need of...