Search results for "Institution"
showing 10 items of 1168 documents
Institutions and Rural Stagnation in Eastern Indonesia
2018
This article addresses why agricultural productivity is still very low in peripheral parts of eastern Indonesia. The paper identifies rules and norms underpinning traditionalism. It further addresses how increased land-use efficiency can be supported while maintaining communal land ownership. Information collected from in-depth interviews was analysed based on new institutional economics (NIE) theory. I argue that the government, adat leaders, the Catholic Church, leading businesses, and internationally funded NGOs are organisations contributing to the status quo. Policy recommendations include awareness among international donors of what NGOs really do. Civil society organisations could co…
“A certain amount of ‘recantation’”: On the origins of Frank H. Knight’s antipositivism
2016
The aim of this paper is to investigate in some detail the origins of Knight’s antipositism and to assess the main influences that brought him to a change in methodological perspective after 1921. As importantly, what follows is also an attempt to increase our general understanding of the methodological debates taking place during the early decades of the last century and to shed new light on the inherently pluralistic character of US interwar economics. This paper is organized as follows: the first section outlines Knight’s methodological views as presented in his early works; the second section discusses Knight’s “recantation” and his attack on behavioristic social science; the third sect…
Money Doctoring After World War II: Arthur I. Bloomfield and the Federal Reserve Missions to South Korea
2009
In this paper we analyse the scientific contributions of the New York Fed economist Arthur I. Bloomfield. A Canadian born economist, in 1941 Bloomfield took his PhD in economics at the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Jacob Viner and then joined the staff of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York as a Research Economist and stayed there until 1958. In this position, Bloomfield combined scholarly research on recent economic history and international financial and banking problems with active service as a member of various committees and commissions, both in the United States and abroad. While on leave from the Fed, he accepted appointments as a consultant and advisor to various …
Institutional individualism and institutional change: the search for a middle way mode of explanation
2001
After noting the lack of enthusiasm of several well-known scholars concerning the adoption of both methodological holism and methodological individualism in its several versions, this paper shows that institutional individualism is a different mode of explanation from both of these and also that it is not the same thing as the so-called Popperian programme of situational analysis. Institutional individualism is a mode of explanation that yields non-systemic and non-reductionist explanations at the same time as it allows for the incorporation into economic theories and models of the many formal and informal institutional aspects surrounding all human interactions, whether these interactions …
Explaining the process of change taking place in legal rules and social norms: The cases of institutional economics and new institutional economics
1995
This paper deals with the phenomenon of institutional change and has been conceived as an attempt to answer the following question: Can we retain theimage of institutional change contained in a theory when we replace a methodological foundation on which the theory was built by a different and alternative one? For an answer to be developed, special attention is paid to the contributions made by institutional economists (IE) and those made by transaction cost—new institutional economists (NIE). The question clearly shows that it is a paper on applied methodology rather than a survey on institutional change contributions. Because of that, its main purpose is not to increase our knowledge about…
Female Institutional Directors on Boards and Firm Value
2016
The aim of this research is to examine what impact female institutional directors on boards have on corporate performance. Previous research shows that institutional female directors cannot be considered as a homogeneous group since they represent investors who may or may not maintain business relations with the companies on whose corporate boards they sit. Thus, it is not only the effect of female institutional directors as a whole on firm value that has been analysed, but also the impact of pressure-resistant female directors, who represent institutional investors (investment, pension and mutual funds) that only invest in the company, and do not maintain a business relation with the firm.…
Beyond Legal Relations: Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld's Influence on American Institutionalism
2011
This paper documents Hohfeld’s influence on interwar American institutionalism. We will mainly focus on three leading figures of the movement: John Rogers Commons, Robert Lee Hale, and John Maurice Clark. They regarded Hohfeld’s contribution on jural relations as a preliminary step toward the understanding of the adversarial nature of legal rights. Albeit with substantial differences in style, method and emphasis, Hohfeld’s schema provided a powerful analytical and rhetorical tool for their analysis This paper documents Hohfeld's influence on interwar American institutionalism. We will mainly focus on three leading figures of the movement: John Rogers Commons, Robert Lee Hale, and John Maur…
Does one size fit all? The impact of cognitive skills on economic growth
2016
Les Documents de Travail de l'IREDU, n°2016-1; This paper tests for heterogeneous effects of cognitive skills on economic growth across countries. Using a new extended dataset on cognitive skills and controlling for potential endogeneity, we find that the magnitude of the effect is about 60 per cent higher for low-income countries compared to high-income countries, and it more than doubles when low TFP countries are compared to high TFP countries. There are also marked differences across geographic regions. Using data on the share of the population with advanced and minimum skill levels, our results also indicate that high-income countries should focus on increasing the number of high skill…
The role of roles in risk management change: the case of an Italian bank
2014
This paper explores the role of roles (i.e. groups of actors characterised by the same functional tasks within an organisation), and of their interactions, within processes of change in risk management (RM). By combining insights from the literature on RM and from institutional studies, this paper suggests that change in RM can be interpreted as a process that involves both enabling and precipitating dynamics [Greenwood, R., & Hinings, C. R. (1996). Understanding radical organizational change: Bringing together the old and the new institutionalism. The Academy of Management Review, 21, 1022â1054. doi:10.5465/AMR.1996.9704071862] between different roles. Aiming to address these dynamic…
Youth Transition from School to Work in Spain
2001
Using a data set drawn from the Encuesta Socio-Demográfica conducted by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística in 1991, we analyze the labor market entrance of Spanish school leavers and the match between education and work at the early stages of working life. The empirical evidence shows that human capital exerts a strong influence on the duration of unemployment. With regard to the job match between education and work we find that young workers are more likely to be underutilized compared to their adult co-workers. Regression results indicate that people with higher education have, all else being equal, a lower probability of being overeducated and a shorter lenght of unemployment. They al…