This book contains the most sustained and serious attack on mainstream, neoclassical economics in more than forty years. Nelson and Winter focus their critique on the basic question of how firms and industries change overtime. They marshal significant objections to the fundamental neoclassical assumptions of profit maximization and market equilibrium, which they find ineffective in the analysis of technological innovation and the dynamics of competition among firms. To replace these assumptions, they borrow from biology the concept of natural selection to construct a precise and detailed evolutionary theory of business behavior. They grant that films are motivated by profit and engage in search for ways of improving profits, but they do not consider them to be profit maximizing. Likewise, they emphasize the tendency for the more profitable firms to drive the less profitable ones out of business, but they do not focus their analysis on hypothetical states of industry equilibrium. The results of their new paradigm and analytical framework are impressive. Not only have they been able to develop more coherent and powerful models of competitive firm dynamics under conditions of growth and technological change, but their approach is compatible with findings in psychology and other social sciences. Finally, their work has important implications for welfare economics and for government policy toward industry.

Evolutionary theory belongs to the rare species of theories that are simultaneously fundamental and over-arching, implicating as it does numerous life contexts as well as an array of scholarly disciplines. Armed with a profound grasp of evolutionary theory and its implications to social research, Professors Zumbansen and Calliess have mobilized an appropriately diverse and truly stellar group of academics to investigate how this theory may provide new insights about law, economics, and their inter-relations. Cast against an especially broad intellectual backdrop set by the editors, this volume is sure to become a standard reference in literature. Amir N. Licht, Radzyner School of Law, Israel Zumbansen and Calliess have done a wonderful job in assembling papers from the leading scholars in the field, who draw on evolutionary approaches for explaining developments in both economics and the law. Anybody interested in issues of institutional change will be inspired by the wealth of ideas and the diversity of perspectives. Stefan Voigt, University of Hamburg, Germany Law and economics has arguably become one of the most influential theories in contemporary legal theory and adjudication. The essays in this volume, authored by both legal scholars and economists, constitute lively and critical engagements between law and economics and new institutional economics from the perspectives of legal and evolutionary theory. The result is a fresh look at core concepts in law and economics such as institutions , institutional change and market failure that offer new perspectives on the relationship between economic and legal governance. The increasingly transnational dimension of regulatory governance presents lawyers, economists and social scientists with an unprecedented number of complex analytical and conceptual questions. The contributions to this volume engage with legal theory, new institutional economics, economic sociology and evolutionary economics in an interdisciplinary assessment of the capacities and limits of the state, markets and institutions. Drawing as well upon legal sociology and the philosophy of law, the authors expand and transform the known terrain of law and economics by applying evolutionary theory to both law and economics from a domestic and transnational perspective. Legal scholars, evolutionary and regulatory theorists, economists, economic sociologists, economic historians and political scientists will find this cutting-edge volume both challenging and engaging.

The financial system and its regulation have undergone exponential growth and dramatic reform over the last thirty years. This period has witnessed major developments in the nature and intensity of financial markets, as well as repeated cycles of regulatory reform and development, often linked to crisis conditions. The recent financial crisis has led to unparalleled interest in financial regulation from policymakers, economists, legal practitioners, and the academic community, and has prompted large-scale regulatory reform. The Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation is the first comprehensive, authoritative, and state of the art account of the nature of financial regulation. Written by an international team of leading scholars in the field, it takes a contextual and comparative approach to examine scholarly, policy, and regulatory developments in the past three decades. The first three parts of the Handbook address the underpinning horizontal themes which arise in financial regulation: financial systems and regulation; the organization of financial system regulation, including regional examples from the EU and the US; and the delivery of outcomes and regulatory techniques. The final three Parts address the perennial objectives of financial regulation, widely regarded as the anchors of financial regulation internationally: financial stability, market efficiency, integrity, and transparency; and consumer protection. The Oxford Handbook of Financial Regulation is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of financial regulation, economists, policy-makers and regulators.

This unique book presents various ways in which evolutionary theory can contribute to the analysis of key legal-philosophical problems. Wojciech Zaluski explores three central questions; the ontological question - what is the nature of law?; the teleological-axiological question - what are the main values to be realized by law?; the normativity question, which has two aspects; normative: what explains the fact that legal norms provide reasons for action?, and motivational: what explains the fact that humans can be motivated by legal norms? It is argued that evolutionary theory suggests non-trivial answers to these questions, and that these answers can become the building blocks of a new - evolutionary - paradigm in legal philosophy. Being the first study entirely devoted to the analysis of fundamental legal-philosophical problems from the standpoint of evolutionary theory, this book is a must-read for graduate and postgraduate students, practitioners and philosophers in the field of legal philosophy.

​This short books offers the reader a remarkable new perspective on the way markets, laws and societies evolve together. It can be of use to anyone interested in development, market and public sector reform, public administration, politics & law. Based on a wide variety of case studies on three continents and a variety of conceptual sources, the authors develop a theory that clarifies the nature and functioning of dependencies that mark governance evolutions. This in turn delineates in an entirely new manner the spaces open for policy experiment. As such, it offers a new mapping of the middle ground between libertarianism and social engineering. Theoretically, the approach draws on a wide array of sources: institutional & development economics, systems theories, post-structuralism, actor- network theories, planning theory and legal studies.

Evolutionary economics sees the economy as always in motion with change being driven largely by continuing innovation. This approach to economics, heavily influenced by the work of Joseph Schumpeter, saw a revival as an alternative way of thinking about economic advancement as a result of Richard Nelson and Sidney Winter's seminal book, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, first published in 1982. In this long-awaited follow-up, Nelson is joined by leading figures in the field of evolutionary economics, reviewing in detail how this perspective has been manifest in various areas of economic inquiry where evolutionary economists have been active. Providing the perfect overview for interested economists and social scientists, readers will learn how in each of the diverse fields featured, evolutionary economics has enabled an improved understanding of how and why economic progress occurs.

not gentle to the capitalists" (Schumpeter, 1991). Thus, by instead portraying the conflict between entreprenuerial activity and the sociology of the modern state, he came quite close to the analysis carried out by Thorstein Veblen some decades earlier, who emphasized the conflict between p- gressive technology and the institutions of a contemporary "predatory dynastic State of early modern times, superficially altered by a suffusion of democratic and parliamentary institutions" (Veblen, 1964, p. 398). Modern neo-Schumpeterian approaches have continued to build on this groundwork provided by their master. During recent years there has been a great upsurge of discussion on technology, innovations, technological regimes, etc. from the dynamic perspective provided by Schumpeter (Dosi, 1984, Rosegger, 1985; Dosi et al., 1988). Thus the search process for (t- poral) extra profits has been stressed and has been used for modelling attempts. The wider institutional framework for technological change and innovation activity has also been strongly developed more recently. Hence emphasis has grown in the study of technological and industrial regimes, path dependency, and the network approach, developed recently, that social relationships structure the opportunities and constraints that face firms and agents that, for example, carry out innovations (Snehota, 1990).

This paper is the introduction essay to an edited collection entitled “Law, Economics, and Evolutionary Theory”, forthcoming with Edward Elgar. The volume brings together work by legal scholars, economists, historians and sociologists and aims at a critical investigation of the parallel and often competing theoretical architectures of legal and economic governance from an evolutionary perspective. By reconstructing discussions in law over the relationship between legal realism, law & society, and law & economics, and in economics over the merits and prospects of institutional and neo-institutional economics from an evolutionary perspective, the introduction argues that a theory of governance must today build on and incorporate the developments in both of these regulatory disciplines. Contributions from evolutionary theory and sociology, in particular in the important field of economic sociology, provide a fresh perspective on the particular dynamics of disciplinary development. Authors to the volume include Marc Amstutz, Amitai Aviram, Bruce Benson, Gralf-Peter Calliess, Fabio Carvalho, Paul David, Simon Deakin, Bart Du Laing, Martina Eckardt, Thráinn Eggertsson, Jörg Freiling, Wolfgang Kerber, Richard McAdams, Joel Mokyr, Eric Posner, Moritz Renner, Erich Schanze, Jan Smits and Mauro Zamboni.

It is widely recognised that mainstream economics has failed to translate micro consistently into macro economics and to provide endogenous explanations for the continual changes in the economic system. Since the early 1980s, a growing number of economists have been trying to provide answers to these two key questions by applying an evolutionary approach. This new departure has yielded a rich literature with enormous variety, but the unifying principles connecting the various ideas and views presented are, as yet, not apparent. This 2005 volume brings together fifteen original articles from scholars - each of whom has made a significant contribution to the field - in their common effort to reconstruct economics as an evolutionary science. Using meso economics as an analytical entity to bridge micro and macro economics as well as static and dynamic realms, a unified economic theory emerges.