Filip Lubinski

To my surprise, the short article I wrote on the most recent Nobel Prize in Economics winners — Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson — and Classical Political Economy got into the TOP10 SSRN downloads in its category.

You can check the working paper here:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5036014

The article attempts to compare the research program of New Institutional Economics, represented by the most recent ‘Nobel Prize’ winners, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson, with broadly defined Classical Political Economy. The attempt is made in two sections. The first one briefly explains the meaning of these two research programs, as understood in this article. The second section compares them in four key areas: the purpose of economic inquiries, historical perspective, political factors, and legal systems, especially property rights. This article pursues presenting unobvious similarities between New Institutional Economics and Classical Economics. What is intriguing, they are similar not only at the level of their ideas. They also use the same historical examples to illustrate them. These similarities, as explained in the text, might be of significance in the ongoing discussion on the state of the discipline. The article frequently refers to other scholars awarded the ‘Nobel Prize’ for their work in institutional economics.