New institutional economics (NIE) studies institutions and how they emerge, operate, and evolve. They also include organizational arrangements, intended as modes of governing economic transactions. Universities offer an exciting ground for testing the role of different institutional arrangements...

Trust, trustworthiness and ethical norms of reciprocity and cooperation have been receiving more and more attention in economic analysis. In particular, two concepts have been widely used in order to study the socio-economic effects of these factors: the concept of social capital (hereafter also...

In the debate surrounding various reforms in higher education systems, performance, along with how universities should be governed, have been main issues. We argue that the demand for shared governance, i.e., faculty participation in decision‐making vs. concentrated or top‐down decision‐...

Drawing on the theoretical and experimental literature on distributive justice, we put some assumptions of the contractarian argument to an empirical test by means of an experiment which investigates the influence that explicit agreement under the veil of ignorance may have on individuals’...

This book focuses on the concepts of social capital, corporate social responsibility, and economic development in relation to economic theory of institutions and behavioural economics. It also takes a macroeconomic and empirical approach, on the relationship between social capital, ethical...