ABSTRACT
I have bedeviled Ph.D. candidates during their preliminary oral exams by asking them to name five institutional economists who have won the Nobel Prize. Can there be five in this sometimes marginalized part of economics? Some come up with the names of Douglass North and Ronald Coase because they are relatively recent winners and founders of the new International Society for New Institutional Economics. But five? I shall argue here that there are more than five, and many more who utilize and advance portions of institutional economics theory. To make this argument I shall have to select the components of what constitutes institutional economics, and since there is no official version, it is a personal selection. My claim is not that everyone cited here is an institutionalist, but rather that good economists find it useful to embrace some of its various elements. By putting them all together, I hope to demonstrate that there is a unified body of theory that constitutes institutional economics.
