Experience is a major source of knowledge. Could institutions be improved by eliciting the additional knowledge held by experienced individuals? I show here that in several areas of the law experienced individuals are more critical of institutional quality than inexperienced individuals. Moreover, performance indexes built with experienced subsamples substantially alter country rankings. Assuming no unmeasured confounders, more knowledge arguably leads experienced individuals to revise the more benign view held by the general population, composed mostly of inexperienced individuals. Moreover, experience is a stronger driver than alternative sources of knowledge, including education, which might therefore be reinforcing milder and, arguably, incorrect assessments of institutional quality. After observing how this ‘experience effect’ varies systematically across countries, I conclude by proposing that evaluations of institutional quality pay greater attention to experienced individuals and cautioning against basing inferences on assessments made by the general population.

Robert Neild (born 1924) has made a major contribution to economics and to peace studies. This paper provides a brief sketch of Neild's life and work. While noting his research in economic policy and peace studies, this essay devotes more attention to his largely unnoticed contributions to institutional and evolutionary economics since 1984. These are important in their own right, but they are especially notable because Cambridge heterodox economists have been devoted mainly to other approaches, including Marxism and post-Keynesianism. Neild's distinctive contribution is partly explained by his closeness to both Nicholas Kaldor and Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal made explicit his adherence to the original American institutionalism: Neild extended that link to Cambridge.

In this paper, we present results from of a large-scale replication of Hodgson and Rothman's (1999, The Economic Journal, 109(453): 165–186) seminal analysis of the institutional and geographical concentration of authors publishing in top economic journals. We analyze bibliometric data of more than 49,000 articles published in a set of 30 highly influential economic journals between 1990 and 2018. Based on a random sample of 3,253 authors, we further analyze the PhD-granting institutions of the authors under study to better scrutinize the claim of an ‘institutional oligopoly’. The findings confirm the long-term persistence of strong oligopolistic structures in terms of both, author affiliations as well as PhD-granting institutions.

The objective of this study is to show how contract-intensive economic institutions can promote diversity and inclusion of social and political groups in economic and business opportunities provided by governments. Building on the interdisciplinary political economy and governance literatures, two types of economic institutions are identified: rent-seeking and contract-intensive. It is argued that rent-seeking economic activities can reinforce in-group norms, gift-giving practices, and governments' discrimination of groups. However, when contract-intensive activities increase in an economy, they can enhance diversity and inclusion of groups in the marketplace creating opportunity structures outside the state and as businesses press governments toward greater impartiality. Analyses of 165 countries from 1961 to 2011 show that a one standard deviation increase in contract-intensive economic activity is associated with a substantial 18 percent increase in the equality of access to state business opportunities for both social and political groups in the long run.

How can gift and gift-giving studies be relevant to the study of institutions and vice versa? This is the question we broadly address in the introduction to this symposium while drawing on the contributing articles and sketching out a possible future research in a perspective of integration between these two fields of study. Is the gift an institution? What types of methodological approaches would be most suitable in view of such integration? We define the gift as transfers underpinned by institutions, including customs and norms. We contend that the institutional thought can employ empirical and qualitative research methods used by anthropology and that there are important and fruitful lines of tension between gift-giving and institutions – from the relationship between freedom and obligation to the role of third sector between state and market – worthy of further research in the future.

We develop a framework for understanding how legal structures relate to imprisonment. We hypothesize that relatively more hierarchy within criminal justice institutions, compared to commercial law, fosters higher rates of incarceration. Our framework predicts that incarceration reflects asymmetric opportunities for rent seeking across differently organized legal institutions. Instead of comparing criminal justice institutions across nations in absolute terms, we investigate the relative degrees of institutional centralization across legal spheres. To provide support, we document the separate historical experiences that shaped divergent organizations across England and France. Within each country, criminal legal institutions developed inverse organizational traits from commercial legal processes. As a result, the contrasting organizations created asymmetric opportunities for rent seeking. Divergent contemporary outcomes can be understood by recognizing these initial organizational choices, the relative opportunities they created, and their subsequent path dependencies. We document contemporary England, France, and the United States’ incarceration trends and penal outcomes to provide empirical support.

Decades of research show that economic freedom is highly correlated with desirable economic outcomes both internationally and locally. Yet we still know little about the transition from low to high levels of economic freedom, particularly for institutions under local control. This research shows that while economic freedom in the United States is decreasing with regard to institutions under national control, it is increasing with regard to institutions under state and local control. Economic freedom increases gradually among the states, driven primarily by increasing labor market freedom. Decreases in economic freedom, on the other hand, occur sharply, often following stark changes to state fiscal policies.

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.

We analyse how institutional complementarities between employee representation laws and dismissal restrictions influence aggregate innovation outcomes. We argue that greater employee voice, due to improved employee representation legislations, may spur innovative effort by employees only when shareholders cannot renegotiate ex-ante agreements with workers over revenue sharing, by threatening dismissal. We perform a panel regression analysis, exploiting country-sector panel data over the 1977–2005 period, and find that stronger employee representation laws in the presence of stricter firing restrictions are in fact associated with higher patenting activity. Consistently with our theoretical argument, the magnitude of this empirical relationship is seen to be relatively larger in those sectors where the human capital contribution to production is higher. Implications for the analysis of economic institutions and for legal policy making are proposed.

Orthodox economic theorising on ancient societies emphasises the absence of market institutions, in contrast to advanced contemporary economies. However, this may downplay the influence of non-economic interests in the generation of wealth. Consequently, this paper examines an ancient civilisation identified as economically successful namely, the Mauryan Empire (322 to 85 BCE) centred on the Indo-Gangetic plains. Drawing on translations of books collectively known as the Arthasastra (lit. the science of wealth) as well as contemporaneous Greek and Roman texts, this paper examines the role of institutions in generating wealth within societal norms of income distribution and the preservation of social order. Given the importance of trade to this society, comparisons are made with medieval European institutions in terms of market coordination and the maintenance of generalised trust in trading markets. As a consequence, the role of institutions in addressing social and economic uncertainty affecting an ancient society is highlighted.

This paper explores Elinor Ostrom's account of practical reason through the conceptual lens provided by a typology of dimensions of rational conduct advanced by Amartya Sen. On Sen's view, self-interested behaviour has three independent, and separable, features: self-centred welfare, self-welfare goal and self-goal choice. We suggest that Ostrom is committed to a version of rational choice theory that retains the assumptions of self-welfare goal and self-goal choice but, by acknowledging that people's welfare is affected by factors beyond their material consumption, departs from the assumption of self-welfare goal. We argue that this departure is not necessarily driven by an acknowledgement, along Senian lines, that people may have reasons for action other than the single-minded pursuit of their own goals, but rather by Ostrom's belief that the decision problem people face is so complex that maximising behaviour is rendered impossible. We illustrate this argument by analysing how Elinor Ostrom's position differs not only from Sen's but also from that of her husband and long-time collaborator Vincent Ostrom, who in his analysis of the covenantal aspects of rule-making seems to depart from the assumptions of instrumental rationality and preference-satisfaction.

Intrapreneurs, entrepreneurial employees, constitute an important force behind innovations in the economy. Yet, what factors that promote intrapreneurship at the country level are an underdeveloped research area. This paper provides an important contribution regarding the methodological approach and the broad set of potential explanatory factors studied. Based on machine-learning techniques (Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator (LASSO) and Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA)), we investigate the influence of over 60 factors capturing institutional, demographic, cultural, and developmental factors. We find that the quality of government measured as impartiality, i.e. that the public institutions treat the citizens in a non-discriminatory fashion and do not favor some groups or individuals, and the level of human capital, measured as the average years of schooling, are the most important factors predicting the level of intrapreneurship across countries. Instrumental variable results support a causal interpretation. The findings emphasize the importance of policy to establish well-functioning and impartial institutions as well as to promote higher education.

In this paper, we present a series of environmental policies that were implemented by the city-state of Athens during the Classical period (508–323 BCE) through a specific set of environmental institutions. They included: waste management, the implementation of a recycling process regarding animal manure as well as hygiene practices. Special administrative bodies were set up for this purpose with the power to impose heavy fines to offenders, and the actual job of environmental protection was contracted out to private operators. We argue that the success of the Athenian environmental institutions should primarily be attributed to the economic stimuli that the Athenian state provided to their staff so as to perform their duties efficiently, as well as to the imposition of fines and/or other penalties if they provided subpar services. We finally provide proposals as to how the Athenian environmental policies may be seen as an inspiration for our modern societies.

This paper reports an experiment in which participants were allowed an hour to find the cheapest mobile phone plan for a specific usage remit and were given either (a) access to an offline archive of provider websites or (b) access to the Internet. They were required to think aloud, and recordings were made of what they said and what transpired on their computer screens. Access to comparison sites and other market institutions resulted in significantly cheaper plans being selected on average. Within the group of online subjects, excess costs of recommended plans were inversely related to the time spent using market institutions. Although the designs of comparison websites sometimes hampered decision making, outcomes were generally enhanced by the ability to use these online market institutions.

Posner's (2010) analysis offers many exciting insights into the principal-agent problem, particularly with respect to the secret service. I argue that it would be useful to consider a broader model of human behaviour, which includes awards as extrinsic incentives beyond pay, as well as intrinsic motivation. A more comparative stance that goes beyond the United States would be a useful check of how general the results are. Scholars should not forget that while the US is the dominant economy today, there are 195 nations in the world that offer many fascinating institutional variations, which are useful to take into account.

In his critique of the newer approach in economic development emphasizing institutional reforms, Ha-Joon Chang, in his article titled ‘Institutions and Economic Development: Theory, Policy and History’, equates New Institutional Economics with the program of liberal reforms for least developed countries (LDCs) and blames the former for the alleged failure of the latter. He argues with some justice that the dominant discourse in New Institutional Economics insufficiently appreciates the complexity of institutions; as a consequence, the difficulty of transplanting institutions is largely discounted. His case, however, is marred by his attempt to push down his ideological biases by marshalling inchoate, highly questionable and often contradictory ideas as facts. Going beyond a critical examination of the New Institutional Economics inspired discourse in development economics, he advocates his own version of beneficial development policies for LDCs – namely, economic democracy and industrial policies. His proposals are not only highly questionable, but they amount to adopting a double standard of exempting himself from the very criticisms he levies against New Institutional Economics – ignoring the difficulty of importing foreign institutions. Presuming to play God, like many development economists, he ignores the essential fact that an unwilling horse cannot be made to drink.

Local governments in autocracies typically undercompensate residents for their land and take it through eminent domain, while residents lack effective formal channels for bargaining with them. I find that some residents nonetheless can defend against such predation through extralegal land bargaining. By sending resistance signals to challenge the legitimacy of local governments, publicize their grievances, and garner public sympathy, such residents embarrass governments, make it likely higher-level governments will punish local governments, and spur concessions. Such signals, however, are often costly or unavailable, so only resistant entrepreneurs can send them. I illustrate the argument by treating ‘nail-house resistance’ in China as a resistance signal: by refusing to vacate their houses, engaging in violence or self-burning, or turning to the media, some residents stop land takings or gain compensation. The findings enrich our understanding of the political and moral economy of land bargaining and institutional change in a transitional autocracy.

Bart Wilson argues that property is based on custom, not rights. Wilson (2022) further argues for the primacy of property over property rights. Wilson's research, including the recent book, The Property Species: Mine, Yours, and the Human Mind (2020), is a significant and arguably pathbreaking contribution to the vast literature on property and property rights. It also falls into the trap of economic arguments that unnecessarily devalue legal rights. I ague that we can all agree that ideas about property are always important to understanding property rights but that property rights still rule. This is in part because those who have property typically care most about property rights. I also argue that Wilson's concept of property is too focused on private ownership, rather than shared ownership or even government ownership of property. I suggest that considering the idea of sharing and other legitimate forms of property ownership alongside private ownership would generalize Wilson's constructivist theory of property and improve our ability to explain the diversity of property rights.

In this study, we examine disparities in financial development at the regional level in India. The major research questions of the study are: how do we measure the level of financial development at the sub-national level? How unequal is financial development across the states? Does it vary by ownership of financial institutions? To explore these research questions, our study develops a composite banking development index at the sub-national level for three different bank groups – public, private and foreign for 25 Indian states covering 1996–2015. Our findings suggest that despite reforms, banking development is significantly higher in the leading high income and more developed regions compared to lagging ones. Furthermore, we find that all bank groups including public banks are concentrated more in the developed regions. Overall, over the years the position of top three and bottom three states in the aggregate banking index have remained unchanged reflecting lop-sidedness of regional development. We also note improvement in the ranking of some north-eastern states during the period 2009–15.

Are judges biased in their decisions? If so, what are the consequences? We propose a conceptual model that estimates the effects of judicial bias and insecurity on the trustworthiness of courts. Additionally, we empirically assess evidence of bias among justices at the Superior Court (STJ). For this purpose, we analyzed 1,412 decisions from 1998 to 2008. Results do not show consistent strong bias toward either the debtor or the creditor. We test a second hypothesis: that Brazilian courts are unpredictable, creating high levels of judicial insecurity. Empirical results corroborate this idea. Finally, we relate the empirical results found in this paper with the conceptual model initially developed, and provide evidence measured by a nationwide survey on the trustworthiness of the judiciary. As our model predicted, preliminary results indicate that citizens have lower levels of trust in the judicial system if courts and judges are biased and unpredictable.