ABSTRACT
This book assembles contributions to an inter-disciplinary workshop that took place at the Max-Planck-Institute of Economics (the former Max-Planck-Institute for Research into Economic Systems) in Jena, Germany, in February 2004. It aimed at discussing the question how to fill a great lacuna within the research program of modern economics: How do consciously designed (or, synonymously, formal) institutions change over historical time? While the change of informal institutions has been a key concern throughout the last two centuries of economic theorizing, particularly for evolutionary economists, designed institutions, i.e., institutions that are enforced by a specialized agent or group of agents, have received much less attention. To be sure, research strands such as Public Choice and Law & Economics have analyzed legislative and judicial institutions – for the most part, however, this has been done within a methodological framework of comparative statics, based on behavioral assumptions that have been borrowed from orthodox Rational Choice theory. Hence, the puzzle of how designed institutions emerge and diffuse over time and what this implies in terms of public policy advise has still been left largely unsolved. What is clear, though, is that the mechanisms of change that are relevant here differ in a fundamental way from those that can be identified in the realm of informal institutions.
