We show how labour market restrictions, such as firing costs, and bail-outs may arise as useful institutions to support investment in specific human capital. The specificity of human capital is determined endogenously. While specific human capital is more productive than the general human capital, it cannot be reallocated across industries. Accordingly, the optimal fraction of individuals with ...

We show that any institution I satisfying some reasonable conditions can be transformed into another institution, Ibeh, which captures formally and abstractly the intuitions of adding support for behavioral equivalence and reasoning to an existing, particular algebraic framework. We call our transformation an “extension” because Ibeh has the same sentences as I and because its entailment relati...

the date of receipt and acceptance should be inserted later Keywords Saturated models · institutions · institution-independent model theory Abstract Saturated models constitute one of the powerful methods of conventional model theory, with many applications. Here we develop a categorical abstract model theoretic approach to saturated models within the theory of institutions. The most important ...

Dædalus Summer 2008 ‘Cosmopolitanism’ is not–or not yet –the name of a determinate political philosophy. Although many contemporary theorists have put forward views that they describe as cosmopolitan, there is little agreement among them about the central elements of a cosmopolitan position. Almost nobody advocates the development of the kind of global state that would give the idea of ‘world c...

Everyday uses of the notion of institution and some typical institutions have been studied and formalized by economists and philosophers. Borrowing from these everyday understandings, and influenced by their formalizations, the notion of institution has been used within the agents community to model and implement a variety of socio-technical systems. Their main purpose is to enable and regulate...

Thus, for each student a composite unscaled mark is generated for each course taken. However, the cohort of students taking a particular course P may be academically more able than the cohort of students taking course Q. This means that a composite unscaled mark of, say, 60 in course P represents a higher level of attainment than the same mark in course Q. Since marks in different courses are a...

The Osteopathic Postdoctoral Training Institution (OPTI) program was established by the American Osteopathic Association (AOA) in 1995 as a support and accreditation structure for osteopathic graduate medical education. Since 1999, all AOA-approved postdoctoral training programs are required to take place in OPTIs. In a continuing effort to further define standards for quality and to promote pr...

In a memo of this length there is insufficient space to fully develop the relatively complex arguments contained in Hall and Soskice’s “Varieties of Capitalism” approach. In what follows I provide a very brief summary of the components of the argument which are most relevant for our purposes. For anyone who is not familiar with this literature an excellent summary of the argument is contained i...