Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance

An excellent little book that should be mandatory reading for any student of economics. North does an incredible job of reminding students that much of the world still exists beyond neoclassical models, and ignoring this fact has badly damaged the reputation and reliability of the field. While some o......more

Douglass North provides an account of the importance of mental models for individuals’ learning and vision of the world along with how individuals shape social, economic, and political institutions. These include formal and informal rules as families, communities, and churches are driving force for......more

The funny thing about this book is that political scientists and sociologists had been saying for a long time that institutions matter. In economics, however, this rediscovery can earn you a Nobel Prize! On a more serious note, however, this book is a theory of both why there has been divergence rat......more

We all remember our development economics professors stressing the central role of "institutions" (in North's words: "institutions are the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, are the humanly-devised constraints that shape human interaction") in the nature, pace and sustainability of ec......more

This is the key book marking the discovery of institutions by neoclassical economics - no matter that the other social sciences had incorporated institutions decades or centuries earlier. The trick then is to assimilate institutions to methodological individualism - the focus on individuals making d......more