Skepticism prevails among a substantial number of economists over a possible connection between civil liberties and the level of economic activity. Until now, empirical research on economic growth has found mixed evidence on the influence of civil liberties. Disaggregation of the Freedom House Civil Liberties Index allows a fresh empirical look at the effect of human rights on long-term growth or economic development. Our results show that one of the four subcategories of the index outperforms all available indicators of property rights institutions in explaining long-term economic growth. This subcategory, Personal Autonomy and Individual Rights, captures the level of second generation human rights that affect the mobility of individuals with respect to housing, employment and university education, as well as the level of protection of property rights. This result is robust with respect to reverse causation, important omitted variables such as geography and human capital, as well as to a variety of sensitivity tests. We also discuss in our conceptual framework how civil liberties work as an indicator of the prevalence of the rule of law and how the latter affects growth or development as an essential public input.

This paper performs a systematic analysis that examines institutional fragmentation in terms of customs tariffs within states west of the Rhine from 1700 to 1815 and between states east of the Rhine from 1815 to 1871. Internal customs zones are measured in two ways: physical size and urban population. Both methods use 175 sample cities as described by De Vries (1984) in England, France, the Netherlands, and Spain as the basic unit of account. The results indicate that customs zones west of the Rhine were small prior to the French Revolution but grew dramatically from 1789 onwards. They thus provide definitive evidence of divided authority in Ancien Régime Europe. The measurement of external customs zones uses 117 sample cities in the German and Italian territories. The findings indicate a remarkable degree of institutional consolidation between states east of the Rhine over the 1800s.

This essay asks what firms are, whether they are ‘real’ social actors, and whether their actions can be traced without remainder to the actions of living people or whether there is some irreducible aspect of their existence or operation that must be attributed to the organization itself. It describes firms as ongoing, multilateral relational contracts from whose operation – that is, from performance over time by specific individuals in the roles and relationships defined by the contract – emerge the firm's idiosyncratic routines and capabilities. It emphasizes the role of entrepreneurs in the creation of firms and the close dependence of organizational capabilities on human performance, and argues that this account is consistent with a reasonable individualism that allows for social outcomes to be determined by the actions and interaction of individuals. It then proposes that firms are nonetheless institutional facts and thus ontologically subjective but epistemically objective components of reality, and concludes with directions for future work.

Integrating organization theory, organizational economics, and organizational law considerations, it is argued that the ‘nature of the firm’ can be more completely understood if it is considered a complete society-establishing contract, including constitutional pacts on procedures for the selection of actions, rather than a nexus of incomplete transactional contracts complemented by authority, power, or relational norms. The explanation is more general since firm-establishing contracts are a sub-set of those society-establishing contracts that are capable of regulating any venture in condition of high uncertainty and potential conflict, and because the constitutional regime adopted (authority-based, democratic, or other) becomes a specification of particular types of firms rather than part of the explanation of the firm. Evidence from published studies, as well as from newly gathered data on firm-founding contracts and other partnership establishing contracts (500 record database on large multi-party projects), document that actual contracts under uncertainty do fit the hypothesized pattern.

Ex-ante impact assessment of agricultural, environmental, and rural policies has become an integral part of political decision-making processes in the European Union. While a variety of agri-environmental modelling tools exists, ex-ante policy assessment tools capturing the institutional dimension are rare and need to be improved. In this paper, we introduce a standardized procedure for ex-ante modelling institutional aspects for policy implementation: the ‘Procedure for Institutional Compatibility Assessment’ (PICA). PICA has been designed as an explorative and flexible, yet formalized methodology that enables policy-makers to identify, at an early stage, potential institutional incompatibilities. After relating PICA to relevant approaches for policy assessment, we elaborate on its four distinct steps, use a core element of the EU Nitrate Directive to illustrate its function, and then provide model validation by means of a test case.

This paper offers a reply to Jochen Runde's critical appraisal of the ontological framework underpinning Dopfer and Potts's (2008) General Theory of Economic Evolution. We argue that Runde's comprehensive critique contains several of what we perceive to be misunderstandings in relation to the key concepts of ‘generic’ and ‘meso’ that we seek here to unpack and redress.