Tack vare stöd från Torsten och Ragnar Söderbergs stiftelser och en välvillig institutionsledning, har jag lyckats trumma igenom en helt ny kurs på Nek i Lund i höst: Institutionell ekonomi.

Vi använder Knacks editerade bok "Democracy, governance and Growth" samt ett artikelkompendium.

(För kommentarstråden: vilka artiklar bör finnas med? Vilka är era favoriter inom institutionell ekonomi? Vilka usla artiklar hör det till allmänbildningen att ändå ha läst?)

Kursen kan läsas av alla som läst åtminstone en termin nationalekonomi.

Kursbeskrivningen:

The course is centred around three questions:

• What are institutions?
• What are the economic consequences of institutions?
• How caninstitutional differences and institutional development be explained?

We depart from the standard definition of institutions as the humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction, covering the difference between formal and informal institutions, as well as the problem of enforcing institutions. In this part we explicitly analyze many of the implicit assumptions in neo-classic economic theory, such as the existence of property rights.

The second part introduces the research regarding institutional explanations of economic outcomes, and thus naturally relates to macro economic issues regarding growth and development.

Finally, the third part discusses how institutional differences and institutional change can be explained. Here, the course will make some use of basic game theory.

Some gender perspective is adopted in this course: A chapter is devoted to discussions of gender and corruption, and gender stereotypes are discussed in relation to the distinction between formal and informal institutions.