This paper explores how a systemic evolutionary view, which argues that evolution is a knowledge generating process, and conceptually or mathematically related perspectives can contribute to an integrated perspective on the evolution of information organization by linking perspectives from...

This working paper provides a survey of the theoretical underpinnings for the various employment guarantee schemes, and discusses full employment policy experiences in the United States, Sweden, India, Argentina, and France. The theoretical and policy developments are delineated in a historical...

"Separation of ownership and control" is a phrase whose history will forever be associated with Adolf A. Berle and Gardiner C. Means' The Modern Corporation and Private Property (1932), as well as with Institutionalist economics, Legal Realism, and the New Deal. Within that milieu the large...

The paper reconsiders the nature of mining districts and property rights during the California gold rush. According to a widely accepted view advanced by Umbeck (1977, 1981), in the absence of effective legal authority, district codes established secure property rights in mining claims. Drawing...

The rise of the “New History of Capitalism” as a subfield of historical studies has magnified differences between economists and historians which started to grow during the 1970s. We describe what is and what is not new about the “New History of Capitalism,” and explain how the different...

This paper challenges the North and Weingast (1989) view that attributes Britain's ascendancy to economic supremacy to institutions that provided protection of property rights starting in the late seventeenth century. We show that for much of the eighteenth century, interest rates in Britain...

This is an entirely new draft of the sixth chapter of my book 'Foundations of Evolutionary Economics' which is going to be published by Edward Elgar in due course. With permission of the publisher, the draft chapters are posted on the web to facilitate academic discussion for further...

A popular misconception among scholars of Adam Smith holds that he thought that government intervention was a good and natural aspect of civil society. Scholars who have this misconception argue that Smith often portrays politicians and government intervention as being benevolent. But there are...

We analyze the evolution of the price of paintings in the XVII century Amsterdam art market to test a hypothesis of endogenous entry: higher profitability should attract more entry of painters, which in turn should lead to artistic innovations and more intense competition. We build a price index...

We analyze art pricing in a unique dataset on Madrid inventories between 1600 and 1750. Hedonic regressions reveal a number of interesting facts about the taste of Baroque Spanish collectors and the imports of foreign paintings. The hedonic price index shows an impressive increase in the price...