Money is an information system to value, record, and track economic transactions. It is an information system with minimal semantics and centralized control. Consequently, the monetary system fails to support many transactions directly, but requires intermediaries such as banks, brokers, insurance companies, credit card companies, and investment firms, increasing transaction costs greatly. Sema...

In this paper, we construct a simple model of simultaneous change and persistence in institutions. The model consists of landowning elites and workers, and the key economic decision concerns the form of economic institutions regulating the transaction of labor (e.g., competitive markets versus labor repression). The main idea is that equilibrium economic institutions are a result of the exercis...

This paper develops the empirical and theoretical case that differences in economic institutions are the fundamental cause of differences in economic development. We first document the empirical importance of institutions by focusing on two "quasi-natural experiments" in history, the division of Korea into two parts with very different economic institutions and the colonization of much of the w...

The idea that economic institutions are determinants of long-run economic performance is largely associated with the work of Douglass North and several other economists in the post-War period. Although the importance of institutions has been recognized by many authors since at least Adam Smith (1776), much of post-War economics research ignored the importance of institutions for economic growth...

To bridge the gap between invention and innovation, prenovation has to be focused. One of the elements of prenovation is emphasizing and creating policies for institutions. This research paper highlights the importance of having an intrapreneurial culture in higher education institutions. The purpose of this paper is to review literature related to intrapreneurial culture and find out the posit...

The advent of publishing anonymized call detail records opens the door for temporal and spatial human dynamics studies. Such studies, besides being useful for creating universal models for mobility patterns, could be also used for creating new socio-economic proxy indicators that will not rely only on the local or state institutions. In this paper, from the frequency of calls at different times...

Sen lists five types of freedoms as integral to equipping people with necessary capabilities. He goes on to assert the importance of institutions in ensuring these five freedoms. In this paper, this emphasis on institutions as vehicles for capability-creation is re-interpreted from the perspective of a segmented society with multiple institutions. It argues that innovatively designed local leve...

There has recently been a resurgence of interest in how institutions affect economic performance. A review of this literature reveals that the concept of an "institution" means different things to different scholars, both within economics and across the social sciences. We discuss what factors unify the different definitions of institutions, and develop a concept of institutions useful for the ...

this paper explores the effects of general and agricultural trade openness on economic freedom and alongside with the quality of institutions, on income and poverty. recent cross-country data for over 200 nations in global regions were used to estimate equations for income, poverty and economic freedom. economic freedom appears to have positive impacts on income levels, which together with good...

■ Abstract Wrestling with basic problems of causal inference between institutions and outcomes has been a central focus of political science over the last decade, and as elsewhere in the discipline, scholars of postcommunism have begun to make some headway on these problems. Their efforts have not only advanced important debates about postcommunism, but also in many cases addressed long-standin...