Organizations and Markets

| Peter Klein |

That’s the title and subject of a Festschrift for Jeffrey G. Williamson, edited by Timothy Hatton, Kevin O’Rourke, and Alan Taylor and published last year by MIT Press. Reviewer Dan Bogart describes the field thusly: “In a nutshell, this line of research analyzes the sources of economic growth, the importance of institutions, and the impact of globalization by making comparisons between actual economies. An illuminating contrast is made with early cliometrics, which addressed questions by constructing counterfactuals with the help of theory and calibration. ” As such, the new comparative economic history is a closely related to, though not identical with, the new institutional economic history associated with Douglass North, Barry Weingast, Avner Greif, and others mentioned frequently on these pages. The NCEH takes institutions seriously but does not give them quite as much weight as NIE historians in explaining economic performance.