An Alternative Institutional Approach to Rules, Organizations, and Development

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: University System of Maryland; University of Maryland College Park
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050722000122
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 335-367
• 关键词: Contracts; LAW

摘要

In the middle of the nineteenth century, a handful of societies began creating and enforcing impersonal rules, rules that treat everyone the same, on a broad scale. The existing institutional literatures, while appreciating the importance of impersonal rules for the rule of law, have not understood how they contribute to economic and political development through rules that are enforced but not followed: default rules. The conceptual importance of impersonal default rules is drawn out and then applied to better understand both economic and political development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.