How norms, firms, governments, habits, property rights, and history shape economies beyond abstract price-taking agents.
How the Nobel laureate reframed development and growth as a problem of institutions—formal rules, informal norms, and the beliefs that make economic life predictable enough to invest in.
Veblen and Commons versus Coase and North: what ‘institutional’ economics meant before and after the neoclassical synthesis—and why the two camps still read past each other.
Why 'efficient' outcomes are not guaranteed: increasing returns, compatibility, and small early accidents can shape markets for decades—and what that implies for competition policy and development.
Why do corporations exist if markets are so efficient? Ronald Coase reframed the boundary between firm and market as a problem of costs—search, bargaining, enforcement—and set off the new institutional economics.
Elinor Ostrom proved that communities can manage shared resources without privatization or top-down regulation, challenging one of the most deeply held assumptions in economics and political science.
Thorstein Veblen described status-driven spending in 1899. More than a century later, Instagram and TikTok have turned conspicuous consumption into a global participatory sport.
The standard model treats firms as production functions that take prices as given. In reality, firms lobby, shape regulation, set standards, and wield political power that blurs the line between market competition and political competition.
The intertwined intellectual histories of legal realism and institutional economics, from Commons at Wisconsin to the Chicago law-and-economics revolution and beyond.
From the optimistic belief that regulation corrects market failures to the darker suspicion that it serves the regulated, the economics of regulation has matured into a field that asks hard questions about evidence and institutional design.
Both schools put institutions at the center of economics, but they disagree about method, human nature, and the role of power. Understanding the split clarifies what each tradition can and cannot explain.
Douglass North's framework for understanding why institutions are the fundamental cause of economic performance, and why changing them is so much harder than economists once assumed.
Why early accidents can lock in technologies, institutions, and market structures for decades, and what that means for the comforting assumption that competition always selects the best outcome.