Max-Planck-Institute, Jena, Germany.
In spring 1999, the Institutional Economics unit of the Max-Planck-Institute for Research into Economic Systems organized a workshop on the "Frontiers of Institutional Analysis" which took place in the building of the institute between May 12 and May 14. The unit gathered scholars from America and Europe who presented papers that explored various issues currently debated among institutional economists.
Chiaki Moriguchi, Harvard University, talked about the evolution of employment systems in the United States and Japan between 1900 and 1960, explaining why developments in both countries, while starting out from very similar arrangements, took widely different courses.
Bertin Martens, European Commission, presented a paper on the cognitive mechanics of economic development which endogenized cognitive mechanisms in order to explain institutional change.
Oliver Volckart, MPI Jena, interpreted medieval feudalism as a market for security and traced the origins of the modern sovereign state to attempts of political authorities to appropriate rents on this market.
Gary Libecap, University of Arizona, talked about informational distortion and competitive remedies in government transfer programs, taking the promotion of ethanol in the USA as an example.
Scott Masten, University of Michigan, explained why universities, like legislatures, are not organized as markets, thereby exploring the links between commitment and political governance.
Michael Wohlgemuth, MPI Jena, read a paper about entry barriers into politics that showed in how far the analogy between politics and market processes can be employed to clarify conditions for successful policy reforms.
Pai-Ling Yin, Stanford University, employed Avner Greif's concept of historical and comparative institutional analysis in order to explain the diversity of financial organizations in several countries.
Thráinn Eggertsson, MPI Jena, gave a survey of the economic literature on the emergence of norms, pointed out fruitful lines of further research, and presented the results of his own recent work.
Uwe Mummert, MPI Jena, explored whether informal institutions are really a problem for institutional policy reforms, showing that the importance of conflicts between informal and formal institutions has up to now been vastly overrated.
One result of the workshop was that further research in the direction problems connected with the shaping and the results of political institutions is certainly fruitful. The participants took the opportunity to visit Weimar which is currently cultural capital of Europe.