Historical and Institutional Economics

Schools that study economic behavior as shaped by evolving institutions, custom and historical context rather than by timeless universal laws, spanning the nineteenth-century historical schools and their twentieth and twenty-first century institutionalist and evolutionary successors. Belongs here: the German Historical School and the English Historical School, which argued economic laws are historically and nationally specific; Institutional Economics and New Institutional Economics, which analyze the rules, organizations and property-rights structures that shape economic behavior; Evolutionary Economics, which models the economy as a changing population of routines and technologies; and the Bloomington School, which studies the institutional governance of common-pool resources. Does not belong here: mainstream neoclassical analysis that treats institutions as fixed background rather than as the object of study.