The Social Utility of Informal Institutions

Informal Institutions and Property Rights

In recent years, the call for strong and clear property rights has grown in law and development circles. In the landmark book The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, de Soto put forth the claim that “strong and clear” property rights, formalized rather than informal, are necessary for economic efficiency and for the protection of the poor, who occu...

Matching in Informal Financial Institutions.

This paper analyzes an informal financial institution that brings heterogeneous agents together in groups. We analyze decentralized matching into these groups, and the equilibrium composition of participants that consequently arises. We find that participants sort remarkably well across the competing groups, and that they re-sort immediately following an unexpected exogenous regulatory change. ...

Social Capital and Development: the Role of Formal and Informal Institutions in a Developing Country*

* This is a revised version of a keynote lecture presented at Workshop on Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development: Exploring the Links" organised by International Institute for Sustainable Development at Ottawa, Ontario, January 23, 2001. I wish to thank participants in the Workshop for suggestions that helped revise the paper.

Hrss Hamburg Review of Social Sciences Informal Institutions: Political Action and the Social and Historical Contextualization of the " Homo Oeconomicus "

Political reforms can be understood as the reconfiguration of formal institutions. The rational choice of formal institutions is the core topic of the New Institutional Economics research program. While bounded rationality is a core assumption of the New Institutional Economics and the reason for suboptimal behavior there, additional reference is made to the individual aspiration to intraperson...

Informal Institutions a “Weaknesses” of Hu Behavior