Institutional Law and Economics: The Legal-Economic Nexus

 Our book is out, and we are more than ready to share it!  After much patience, hard work, and delays on our part (and along the supply chain),  The Legal Foundations of Micro-Institutional Performance: A Heterodox Law & Economics Approach is in print and ready for use in advanced undergraduate law and econ classes, heterodox graduate level classes, and by practitioners conducting impact analysis. I encourage anyone interested to click through the hyperlinked text to view the introduction on Elgar's website-- simply click the cover of the book and the front matter will appear. We anticipate numerous reviews in institutional and law and econ journals in the coming months, and are grateful for any and all feedback directed our way. It's our hope that this framework doesn't stop developing here, but rather continues growing like Al Schmid's Situation-Structure-Performance model upon which the Legal-Economic Performance Framework is loosely based, or the application of ...

This week, we are shamelessly promoting the upcoming Institutional Economics: Perspectives and Methods in Pursuit of a Better World ( Pub: October 28th, 2021).   It is edited by our colleague Charles Whalen, who previously reflected on his career as an institutionalist on this blog here , here , and here . The book covers several major institutionalist perspectives and methods in one place. Other authors include Mary Wrenn, and Bill Waller, who are both interviewed in our Legal-Economic Nexus podcast.  How Charles managed to pull this many-authored volume together throughout a global pandemic (with few setbacks) remains a mystery to me.  Eric and I (with Charles) contributed a chapter in the latter section titled: "Institutional impact analysis: the situation, structure, and performance framework." This chapter covers the evolution of Schmid's model, using old files and drafts we found here at MSU and at the University of Wisconsin to piece together the SSP model. Through...

Last week, Eric wrote about George Will's thoughts on capitalism and the spontaneous order . I haven't yet read the book,   The Conservative Sensibility (2019) but being from the rural Midwest, I'm pretty familiar  with the conservative heart of his work. Check out Eric's post for a brief  run-down. What's most interesting to me in these kinds of arguments about capitalism and social order is that there are often two distinct kinds of discourse occurring:  we have the defense of some idea or view of how the world ought to be, and we have discussion of how the world currently is, and how we might address issues in it (Will engages in both at times, the former more so in his book, the latter in his columns). What we rarely get in either type of discourse is a clear, detailed definition of the role of government.   There is plenty of opposition to the "centrally planned economy" on the basis of the work of Hayek (the  knowledge problem ) and Ludwig ...

Academic Detective Work: Writing About the Origins of a Model Recently the anniversary of the start of our MSU/Great Lakes Institutional Econ project came and went, with little fanfare other than a brief review of the past year's accomplishments during my annual review. It has always been a little weird to me to see days or months of work summarized in a few bullet points or publications. This got me thinking about all the hours researchers and academics in general can put in to even the most straight-forward seeming pieces. We call it "research", but some of the time our searching takes us well beyond the usual academic channels and requires some TV-montage-worthy sleuthing. In sub-fields like economic history or institutional economics, this is more obvious. In these fields, the ability to do some academic detective work outside of scholarly journals is a large determinant of success in the job. When writing about the origins of a model or of some line of thought, th...