Douglass North

Douglass C. North was an American economist and economic historian, a founding figure of New Institutional Economics, who taught for much of his career at Washington University in St. Louis. His 1990 book Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance defined institutions as the humanly devised formal rules and informal norms, together with their enforcement, that structure economic and political exchange, and argued that differences in institutions explain long-run differences in economic growth far more than differences in technology or physical resources: societies whose institutions make property rights and contracts credible and secure sustain productive investment and growth, while societies whose institutions fail to do so do not, regardless of the resources or technology available to them. North shared the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Robert Fogel for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change.