Historical Institutional Analysis

Avner Greif

Five Lectures Prepared for:

Summer School European Historical Economics Society

Structural Change in Historical Perspective: The Role of Institutions

21 August - 25 August 2001, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland

Numbers indicate the priority ranking for the readings

First Class: Three Generations of Institutional Analysis

• Old Institutionalism
  Dugger, William M..1990. "The New Insitutionalism: New But Not Insitutionalist." Journal of Economic Issues. v24(2), pp. 423-31.

• New Institutionalism
• Transaction Cost Economics

(2) Williamson, Oliver E. 2000. "The New Institutional Economics: Taking Stock, Looking Ahead," Journal of Economic Literature, 38 (September): 595-613.


• Institutions as Rules

(2) Weingast, Barry, R. 1996. "Political Institutions: Rational Choice Perspectives," in A New Handbook of Political Science. Edited by Robert Goodin and Hans-Dieter Klingemann. Oxford University Press.

• Preliminary to Self-enforcing Institutions

(1)Greif , Avner. 1993. "Contract Enforceability and Economic Institutions in Early Trade: The Maghribi Traders' Coalition." American Economic Review 83(3), June, pp. 525-48. http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/contract-enforce.pdf (pdf)

Calvert, Randall L. 1995. "Rational Actors, Equilibrium, and Social Institutions." In Explaining Social Institutions. Chapter 3, pp. 57-93. Edited by Jack Knight and Itai Sened. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sugden, Robert. 1989. "Spontaneous Order." Journal of Economic Perspective, 3(4), pp. 85-97.

Höllander, Heinz. 1990. "A Social Exchange Approach to Voluntary Cooperation." American Economic Review, 80(5), December, pp. 1157-67.

Second Class: Interactive Analysis

• On the Limitation of the Game Theoretic Conceptualization of Institutions.

Kandori, Michihiro, George Mailath and R. Rob. 1993. "Learning, Mutation, and Long Run Equilibria in Games." Econometrica 61(1), January, pp. 29-56.

Kaneko, Mamoru and Akihiko Matsui. 1999. "Inductive Game Theory: Discrimination and Prejudices," Journal of Public Economic Theory 1(1), pp 1-37.

Denzau A. and D.C. North. 1994. "Shared Mental Models: Ideologies and Institutions." Kyklos, 47, pp. 3-30.

• Interactive and Context Specific Analysis

(1) Greif , Avner. 1998. "Historical and Comparative Institutional Analysis." American Economic Review, (May, no. 2): 80-4. http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/hist-comparative.pdf (pdf)

(2) Milgrom, Paul, Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast. 1990. "The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Medieval Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs," Economics and Politics, 1: 1-23.

(1) Greif, Avner. Forthcoming, 2002. "Institutions and Impersonal Exchange: From Communal to Individual Responsibility." Forthcoming in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. 158(1). http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/Inst-Impersonal.pdf (pdf)

Third Class: Preliminary to Institutional Dynamics

• Are Institutions the Carriers of History?

(2) David, Paul A. 1994. "Why Are Institutions the 'Carriers of History'?: Path-Dependence and the Evolution of Conventions, Organizations and Institutions," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, 5(2), pp. 205-20.

(1) North, Douglass C. 1991. "Institutions." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 5(1), Winter, pp. 97-112.

• Self-enforcing Institutions

Fourth Class: Endogenous Institutional Change

(1) Greif, Avner 2000. The Influence of Past Institution on its Rate of Change: Institutional Perpetuation and Endogenous Institutional Change. Chapter 7 in "Historical Institutional Analysis." Forthcoming, CUP. http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/influence-rateofchange.pdf (pdf)

Greif, Avner. Forthcoming, 2002. "Institutions and Impersonal Exchange: From Communal to Individual Responsibility." Forthcoming in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. 158(1). http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/Inst-Impersonal.pdf (pdf)

Fifth Class: The influence of Past Institutions on the Direction of Institutional Change

(1) "Cultural Beliefs and the Organization of Society: A Historical and Theoretical Reflection on Collectivist and Individualist Societies." The Journal of Political Economy, vol. 102, No. 5 (October 1994): pp. 912-50. http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/cultural-beliefs.pdf (pdf)

Optional Readings of Applied Works in the Spirit of HIA Regarding the Modern Economy:

Greif. A. 1997. Contracting, Enforcement, and Efficiency: Economics Beyond the Law. Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics. Edited by Michael Bruno and Boris Pleskovic. Washington, D.C: The World Bank. http://www-econ.stanford.edu/faculty/greif-Ireland/cont-enforc-effic.pdf (pdf)

Zucker, Lynne G. 1986. Production of Trust: Institutional Sources of Economic Structure, 1840-1920. Research in Organizational Behavior 8: 53-111.

Koszner, Randall S. 1998. Derivatives Clearing Houses: Historical Development, Over-the-Counter Innovations, and Implications for Public versus Private Regulations of the Payment System. Working Paper. Chicago Business School.

Marin, Dalia and Monika Schnitzer. 1995. Tying Trade Flows: A Theory of Countertrade with Evidence. American Economic Review 8(5):1047-64.

Ingram, Paul. 1996. Organizational Forms as a Solution to the Problem of Credible Commitment: The Evolution of Naming Strategies among U.S. Hotel Chains, 1896-1980. Strategic Management Journal 17: 85-98.

Bernstein, Lisa. 1996. Merchant Law in a Merchant Court: Rethinking the Code's Search for Immanent Business Norms. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 144(5).

Banner, Stuart. 1998. The Origin of the New York Stock Exchange, 1791-1860: A Study in Self-Regulation. Journal of Legal Studies XXVII(January): 113-40.

Hall, Peter and David Soskice. 2000. An Introduction to Varieties of Capitalism. In "Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage." Forthcoming book edited by Peter Hall and David Soskice. Preface (pdf), Introduction (pdf), Bibliography (pdf)

Chiaki Moriguchi. 2000. "The Evolution of Employment Relations in U.S. and Japanese Manufacturing Firms, 1900-1960: A Comparative Historical and Institutional Analysis." NBER working paper # W7939. http://papers.nber.org/papers/W7939