Best Institutions
Daron Acemoglu is a Turkish-American economist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research examines political institutions, technological change, labor markets, and economic development. He shared the 2024 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Simon Johnson and...
The Wenxian Tongkao is a Chinese institutional encyclopedia compiled by Ma Duanlin and completed in 1307 during the Yuan dynasty, presented to the throne in 1317. It spans 348 chapters and covers topics including imperial genealogy, economy, government offices, rites, music, military affairs, geogra...
The Tongdian is a Chinese institutional and historical encyclopedia compiled by the Tang dynasty scholar Du You. Completed in 801, the comprehensive text spans 200 chapters and provides a detailed chronological account of political, economic, and social institutions. It systematically covers various...
James Robinson is a British economist at the University of Chicago who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for co-authoring influential work, including Why Nations Fail (2012), on institutions and prosperity.
Simon Johnson is a British-American economist at MIT who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize for his collaborative research on how colonial-era institutions shaped long-run economic development across countries.
Melissa Dell is an American economist at Harvard University whose research combines development economics, economic history, and political economy. She uses detailed historical records and geocoded data to examine how institutions, coercive labor systems, conflict, and state capacity can produce per...
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges was a 19th-century French historian whose work "The Ancient City" fundamentally shaped the modern understanding of ancient Greek and Roman societies.
"The Night of the 12th" (La Nuit du 12) is a 2022 French police procedural directed by Dominik Moll. Based on a true story from Pauline Guéna's novel, the film follows a judicial police squad's investigation into the unsolved murder of a young woman, highlighting institutional flaws in the justice s...
Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist whose research examines capitalism, political economy, labor relations, and institutional change. He served as a director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne and has analyzed tensions between democratic government and ca...
Luigi Zingales is an Italian-American economist and a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research focuses on the intersection of economics and politics, specifically how institutions and political frameworks influence financial markets and corporate behav...
Rohini Pande is an Indian-American development economist and the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics at Yale University. She also serves as the director of the Economic Growth Center, where her research centers on the role of political and economic institutions in shaping development outcomes....
Rafael La Porta is a prominent economist and a professor at Dartmouth College. In the late 1990s, he co-authored a series of highly influential "law and finance" papers with colleagues Florencio López-de-Silanes, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny. This research demonstrated empirically that a count...
