Douglass North

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Douglass Cecil North (born November 5, 1920) is co-recipient of the 1993 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He joined the faculty of Washington University in Saint Louis in 1983 as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics, and served as director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990. In 1992, he became the first economic historian ever to win one of the economics profession's most prestigious honors, the John R. Commons Award, which was established by the International Honors Society in Economics in 1965. Along with Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson, he helped found the International Society for the New Institutional Economics which held its first meeting in St. Louis in 1997. His current research includes property rights, transaction costs, and economic organization in history as well as economic development in developing countries.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in General Curriculum-Humanities in 1942 [link] and a Ph.D. in Economics in 1952, and joined the Merchant Marine during World War II. Prior to finishing his PhD, North had also been a semi-professional photographer and had worked with Dorothea Lange as well as other notable photographers.

North served as an expert for the Copenhagen Consensus.

Major publications

• Institutional Change and American Economic Growth, Cambridge University Press, 1971 (with Lance Davis).
• The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History, 1973 (with Robert Thomas).
• Growth and Welfare in the American Past, Prentice-Hall, 1974.
• Structure and Change in Economic History, Norton, 1981.
• Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, 1990.
• Empirical Studies in Institutional Change, Cambridge University Press, 1996 (edited with Lee Alston & Thrainn Eggertsson).
• Understanding the Process of Economic Change, Princeton University Press, 2004.

External links

• [1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics]
• [CNISS]
• [Hoover Institution homepage]
• [Douglass C. North – Autobiography]

 

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