ABSTRACT
Douglass Cecil North is Spencer T. Olin Professor in Arts and Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, California. He was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1920 and was educated at the University of California, Berkeley (B.A., 1942; Ph.D., 1952). He taught at the University of Washington in Seattle from 1950 to 1983. Before moving to St. Louis, he was also Peterkin Professor of Political Economy at Rice University (1979) and Pitt Professor of American Institutions at Cambridge University (1981-2). North was Editor (with William Parker) of the Journal of Economic History (1961-6), served as a Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (1967-86), was President of the Economic History Association (1972-3) and of the Western Economics Association (1975-6), was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1987, and received the John R. Commons Award in 1991 from the international honor society in economics, Omicron Delta Epsilon. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, jointly with Robert W. Fogel, in 1993. He has also been honored with a Festschrift, edited by his former students Roger Ransom, Richard Sutch and Gary Walton, Explorations in the New Economic History (Academic Press 1982) and with The Frontiers of the New Institutional Economics (Academic Press 1997), edited by his Washington University colleagues, John Drobak and John Nye.
