Both institutional quality and institutional stability have been argued to stimulate economic growth. But to improve institutional quality, a country must endure a period of institutional change, which implies at least a little and possibly a lot of institutional instability. We investigate the...

The aim of this arti cle is to show that the New Insti tuti onal Economics is an interdisciplinary stream combining economics, law, organizati on theory, politi cal sciences, sociology, and anthropology. The main theories which are part of the New Insti tuti onal Economics are: Agency Theory,...

Nowadays, the most typical reforms in higher education are conducted through the reorganization of universities either in the form of a merger, acquisition, or new status attainment. As a result, universities which educate local leaders for their respective national economies and have a profound...

This paper studies whether institutions matter for economic performance. For this aim, we first construct a simple framework illustrating how to examine the interaction between institutions and economic performance from a different point of view. Then, using this framework, we introduce an...

I interpret the theory of entrepreneurial discovery from the perspective of the theory of property rights. I analyze pure entrepreneurial profit and the logical construction of the theory as an extension of neo-classical microeconomic analysis and I argue that the key motivation for...

There seems to be recent evidence of a relation between economic development and the college graduates profile. Some majors such as engineering apparently are more growth inductive than others. However, economic theory does not give us a strong support to this relation. Human capital theory...

The main contribution of Coase1 is having proven that no institution is a free lunch (among others, Pagano, 2012). it means that every institution (e.g. the market and the firm) has non-null costs of functioning, i.e. transaction costs. in a world with positive transaction costs, the...

Using the institutional theory of transaction costs, I demonstrate that the assumptions of the competitive labour market model are internally contradictory and lead to the conclusion that on purely theoretical grounds a perfectly competitive labour market is a logical impossibility. By...

Collective action at impersonal scale involves losses to autonomy by definition because of the need to centralize some measure of authority. This stands as an important cost to collective action that varies in predictable ways depending on the extent of organizational choice available to...

The economic characteristics of software and transaction costs explain, why closed source and open source software co-exist. It is about the efficient use of a non- and anti-scarce resource. But because of ex-post transaction costs that lead to information asymmetries, some property rights...