There is a broad agreement that political and economic institutions matter for long-term development. Yet relatively little is known as to how to adopt good quality institutions and reform weak or poor institutions, for which one needs to know how institutions change. This paper provides a...

The paper tries to improve our understanding on the role of institutions in development by critically examining the current orthodox discourse on institutions and highlighting some of its key problems. After discussing some definitional problems, the chapter examines a number of problems in the...

Dieser Beitrag erläutert die Forschungsbeiträge, für die Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson und James A. Robinson im Jahr 2024 mit dem Nobel-Gedächtnispreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften ausgezeichnet wurden. Gewürdigt werden erstens ihre empirischen Untersuchungen zur Unterscheidung zwischen...

In emerging markets for high-value food products in developing countries, processing companies search for efficient ways to source raw material of consistent quality. One widely embraced approach is contract farming. But relatively little is known about the appropriate design of contracts,...

We review the theoretical and empirical literature on commitment devices. A commitment device is any arrangement, entered into by an individual, with the aim of making it easier to fulfill his or her own future plans. We argue that there is growing empirical evidence supporting the proposition...

Township Village Enterprises (TVEs) have essentially contributed to China's economic development and institutional transformation over the last twenty years. One of the explanations for the mechanism of TVEs' growth is the co-operative culture theory which claims that Chinese - compared with...

We study the joint role of altruism and impatience, and the impact of evolution in the formation of long-term time preferences and in the determination of optimal consumption and optimal bequests. We show how the consumption paths of dynasties relate to altruism and to impatience, and we reason...