Did colonial policies in India deliver excessive returns to British investors? We answer this question using annual data on Indian securities trading on the London Stock Exchange. We present new series on market capitalization, capital gains, dividend yields, and total returns of railway securities from 1880 to 1929. The average annual total return on the largest and most important Indian railway securities was 3.7%. These returns were not excessive by any financial standard. Indeed, they were lower than the return on railway securities in North America, Latin America, and Asia. We also undertake an event study analysis to assess whether Indian railways significantly benefited British investors. When the Government of India purchased large positions in the private railway companies between 1880 and 1910, there were opportunities for profit making. However, we find no evidence of abnormal investor returns in the years leading to the purchase of railway companies. Broadly our findings call into question the extractive nature of colonial railway policy.

This paper seeks to answer the question of what psychological preconditions must exist for institutions to determine behaviour and order our societies. We defend the notion that institutional theory may gain from such a contribution. We introduce a new theory of the mind as a network structure within which the psychological process operates to integrate insights from cognitive and affective psychology into institutional theory. We discover that institutions must be expressed as rules in mental networks which guide thinking and behaviour, be embedded within a cognitive apparatus such that they are called to mind by perception to so guide thinking and behaviour and be anchored to emotion such that they are endowed with urgency in order for them to have a hold on individual behaviour. From this theory we derive definite predictions, as well as policy insights.

This paper is a contribution to the advancement of a naturalistic social ontology. Individuals participate in an institutionalized practice by following rules. In this perspective, I show that the nature, the stability, and the dynamics of any institution depend on how people reason about states of affairs that do not occur. That means that counterfactual reasoning is essential in the working of institutions. I present arguments for the importance of counterfactuals as well as a game-theoretic framework to account for them. Since the role of counterfactuals does not directly transpire in people's behavior, the whole discussion can be seen as a broad argument against behaviorism in philosophy and the social sciences.

By declaring an item legal tender or making it publicly receivable, governments might generate sufficient demand to determine the medium of exchange. How do private actors launch a new money? There are two views in the literature. The first requires offering an item with a use value to some agents that is distinct from its role as a medium of exchange. The second suggests that agents might coordinate on an intrinsically useless item. With these views in mind, I survey the logs from the original bitcoin forum, bitcoin-list. I find that early participants in the bitcoin community understood the importance of coordination and took steps to coordinate users.

The article traces the remains of the theory of “comparative institutional advantage”, which was crucial during the early development of the “varieties of capitalism” approach to economics but fell into oblivion quickly afterwards. It follows the discussions of the concept over time and works out possible reasons – theoretical, methodological, and discursive – for the theory's decay. In conclusion, many arguments of the theory seem outdated today but it is a great witness to the zeitgeist of comparative political economy and institutional theory of the millennium.

This paper undertakes a descriptive analysis of changes in economic institutions across countries from 2000 to 2016, using Economic Freedom of the World and the “State Economic Modernity” index. This latter index is a recent creation, similar conceptually to state capacity, measuring what can variously be thought of as state building, effectiveness, and economic power. These two indexes are used in concert with one another to classify countries into eight directions of institutional change. Despite recent pessimism, countries besides those at the top world income bracket have continued to liberalize, while wealthy countries have merely stagnated. At the high level aggregates, there is little movement in state economic modernity over this period, although there is considerably heterogeneity among individual countries. Of those measured, Rwanda is the single country to make the greatest movement toward the development benchmark of “Getting to Denmark.”

Development scholars have identified several Hofstede (1980, 2001) cultural dimensions as critically important determinants of long-run economic development across countries. Does economic progress, in turn, shape culture in a predictable direction? This paper investigates whether economic change since 1970 has induced shifts in five of the Hofstede value orientations in a sample of up to 72 countries. To achieve identification, we employ a unique data set on country-level cleavages in the values of two non-overlapping age cohorts approximately one generation (30 years) apart, on average. We find evidence that faster-growing countries during the period of coming of age and personality development of the younger cohort witnessed the rise of more individualistic and politically egalitarian generations, suggesting the existence of a self-perpetuating cycle between certain “good-for-development” cultural attitudes and economic development.

Culture, mainly defined as values and beliefs, has recently attracted much attention in economics. Cultural practices receive less attention, as emphasized in anthropology. We argue that the notion of ‘ritual’ can enrich economic research on culture as a specific form of socially standardized interactions that create shared contexts and emotions to build mutual trust and community. China is an important case in point, because ritual is a central concern in common interpretations of traditional Chinese culture. We look at practices of Chinese entrepreneurs that activate rituals in various settings. We conclude that these phenomena can be analytically condensed in the cultural complex of a ‘ritual economy’.

The paper aims at complementing Searle's social ontology with an epistemology capable of illustrating institution formation. To this purpose, I discuss Searle's conception of constitutive rules and show that it requires the specifications of normative powers and purposes identifying status functions to be taken as given. However, such specifications arise from underlying normative commitments that may be various and possibly conflicting. Hence, in order to account for the formation of institutions, it is necessary to understand how status function declarations may emerge from alternative normative commitments. I make the hypothesis of “interactive intentionality,” as an interactive and deliberative mode of practical reasoning, to describe the processes of convergence on definite constitutive rules. These processes show how interactive intentionality may frame both commitment and enforcement, thus providing some insights to make rule-based and equilibrium-based accounts of institutions epistemologically commensurable.

Definitions are crucial for institutional analysis. This article explains the nature of taxonomic definitions, with particular attention to their use in economics and other social sciences. Taxonomic definitions demarcate one species of entity from another. They are vital for the communication of meaning between scientists, who must share some basic conception of what types of entity they are investigating, to establish a division of labour over subsequent theoretical analysis and empirical investigation of the type of entity defined. Generally, taxonomic definitions build on past usage and are parsimonious: they are not meant to be explanations or descriptions. By contrast, overloaded taxonomic definitions can create square-one disagreement about what is being investigated. As illustrative examples, the paper considers different degrees of progress with attempts to define firms, markets and institutions.

This paper advances and defends the proposition that the basis for the evolution of institutions is the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere. This is based on a deeper proposition that institutions are ideas and ideas become institutions. We draw on the ‘Brisbane School’ of evolutionary/institutional economics and of behavioural/psychological economics to investigate the microdynamics of the competition of ideas in the public sphere, which has been studied at a macroscopic level by Isabel Almudi, Francisco Fatas-Villafranca and Jason Potts. The theory we develop gives us a new vision of institutional evolution as emerging from the microdynamics of the evolution and competition of ideas in the public sphere, and a new foundation for institutional theory. It gives us a new vision of the microdynamics of institutional evolution, the evolutionary fitness of ideas for competition in the public sphere and the likely path of institutional evolution.

That governance within the firm is deliberate, conscious and hierarchical, based on authority is considered almost axiomatic. Chester Barnard is cited as an early theorist of this view. In this short article we review Barnard's original theory of authority, his later work and his private correspondence with F. A. Hayek, Michael Polanyi, Bertrand de Jouvenal and others. We show that Barnard focused in his later thinking less on authority and more on ‘responsibility’ and on the spontaneous nature of coordination within the firm, argued for ‘invisible hand’ explanations of coordination within the firm and compared coordination within the firm to market coordination. We use this information to produce novel insights into the work of Chester Barnard and also to demonstrate that his insights into the inner workings of firms is still not completely understood or reflected in the literature on the firm.

In this paper a sophisticated conception of individuality is developed that extends beyond simple heterogeneity and is consistent with the approach of institutional economics. Studies of human biological and psychological development are used to illustrate the foundations of human individuality and the impact of the social environment on individual development. The link between the social environment and ongoing agential properties is established through the role of habits, which provide some continuity to individual personalities over time and assist them in navigating the social context they inhabit. Reflexivity is established via an agency-structure framework that endows individuals a changeable self-concept and an ability to interpret their relationship to the social context. The coordination of different individuals is explained not simply through reference to institutional structure, but also through the agent-level properties of shared habits. While reducing differences between individuals to one of degrees, shared habits are shown to be particularly important in the context of agent-sensitive institutions. Finally, the potential for different institutional experiences to impact the reflexivity of individuals is explored.

Thorstein Veblen was a pioneer in recognizing the necessity of grounding social science in Darwinian biology and exploring how evolving institutions channel biological proclivities. He especially focused upon how capitalism's social institutions guided the innate need for social status into conspicuous consumption. But why do humans seek status? Surprisingly, Veblen did not pick up on Darwin's concept of sexual selection and recognize it as the driving force behind behavior intended to favorably impress others. This article adds the Darwinian depth that Veblen missed to his understanding of the biologically driven quest for status and its channeling by social institutions. It then explores the turn of most institutionalists away from Veblen's focus on innate behavioral drives in favor of viewing human behavior as more exclusively determined by social conditions. It concludes with reflections on the implications of sexual selection and biological grounding more generally for a theory of institutional economics.

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.

This paper shows that the revolving door generates inequality of influence between financial firms and creates economic distortions. We first develop a theoretical model, introducing the notion of “bureaucratic capital” and stressing how the revolving door generates inequality in bureaucratic capital leading to inequality in profits. Then this prediction is tested, using a new database that tracks the revolving door process involving the 20 biggest US “diversified banks.” We show that regulators who supply a large stock of bureaucratic capital are more likely to be hired by the top five banks. We also develop indices of the inequality of influence between banks. We show that banks in the top revenue quintile concentrate around 80% of revolving door movements. Goldman Sachs appears as the prime beneficiary of this process, capturing approximately 30% of the total stock of bureaucratic capital.

Constitutional scholars emphasize the importance of an enduring, stable constitutional order, which North and Weingast (1989) argue is consistent with credible commitments to sustainable fiscal policies. However, this view is controversial and has received little empirical study. We use 19th-century US state-level data to estimate relationships between constitutional design and the likelihood of a government default. Results indicate that more entrenched and less specific constitutions are associated with a lower likelihood of default.

Blockchain technology has been considered a vehicle to foster development in poor countries by promoting applications such as secure delivery of humanitarian aid, digital identity services, and proof of provenance. This article examines whether (and if so, how) blockchain technology can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of foreign aid governance, thereby moving beyond completely anonymous contexts. Foreign aid governance is plagued by lack of credible commitments among states, which are further exacerbated by information asymmetries and which often undermine aid effectiveness. In this context, blockchain technology holds two promises. First, through the guaranteed execution of smart contracts, it can strengthen the credibility of state commitments, for example collective burden-sharing rules among a group of donors or recipient country compliance with policy conditionality in return for aid. Second, through leveraging prediction markets, blockchain technology can allay information problems related to the verification of real-world events along the entire aid delivery chain.

We experimentally investigate whether and how individuals change formal institutions governing an organization. The focus is on formal rules prescribing individual cooperation to achieve a collective goal. Our analysis accounts for the role of social norms and individuals’ social values. We observe that prosocial individuals –who value cooperation and have a conflict between this value and existing rules allowing for low cooperation– attempt to change this rule. In line with our theoretical discussion, we also find that prosocial individuals first try to change the institutional environment by changing social norms. If this fails, these individuals change formal rules directly.

Political parties, formal, durable and mass organizations that inform voters on public policy issues, nominate candidates for office and fight elections for the right to govern, are ubiquitous in modern representative democracies but were absent from the direct participatory democracy of ancient Athens. The paper investigates how the political institutions of Athens may explain their absence. The arguments explored include voter homogeneity; the conditions at the start of the democracy, characterized by single constituency configuration of the demos, simple majority voting and lack of organized groups; the irrelevance of holding public office for determining public policy; appointment to public posts through sortition; and voting on single-dimension issues. The paper then discusses how in the absence of parties voters became informed and how political leaders were held accountable by the courts.