'Whatever Is, Is Right'? Economic Institutions in Pre-Industrial Europe (Tawney Lecture 2006)
By Sheilagh Ogilvie. Social Science Research Network, 2007
241 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Institutions – the structures of rules and norms governing economic transactions – are widely assigned a central role in economic development. Yet economic history is still dominated by the belief that institutions arise and survive because they are economically efficient. This paper shows that alternative explanations of institutions – particularly those incorporating distributional effects – are consistent with economic theory and supported by empirical findings. Distributional conflicts provide a better explanation than efficiency for the core economic institutions of pre-industrial Europe – serfdom, the community, the craft guild, and the merchant guild. The paper concludes by proposing four desiderata for any future economic theory of institutions.
Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/25548b767efa02ae89c54eab49fb6a4a5f0e75e8
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In Demography
In Economics and Econometrics
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Citations in the corpus
- Institutions and Economic Growth in Historical Perspective (2014, background): “Which institution (or system of institutions) results from this conflict will be affected not just by its efficiency but by its distributional implications for the most powerful individuals and groups (Knight, 1995;Acemoglu et al. 2005; Ogilvie, 2007b).”