Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyse institutions and institutional change in various parts of the world and at various periods of time. The volume is a contribution to the new economics of institutions, which emphasises the role of transaction costs and property rights in shaping incentives and results in the economic arena. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, including students of economics and other social sciences, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, which reflect their collective views as to the present status of institutional analysis and where it is headed.

Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyze institutions and institutional change. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, that reflect their collective views as to the present and future status of institutional analysis.

An important new research program has developed in economics that extends neoclassical economic theory in order to examine the effects of institutions on economic behavior. The body of work emerging from this new line of inquiry includes contributions from the various branches of economic theory, such as the economics of property rights, the theory of the firm, cliometrics and law and economics. This book is the first comprehensive survey of this research program, which the author terms "neoinstitutional economics." The author proposes a unified approach to this research, integrating the work of various contributors and emphasizing the common principles of inquiry that tie the work together. The theoretical discussion is accomplished by empirical studies dealing with a whole range of institutions and economic systems.