The Legal Foundations of Micro-Institutional Performance: A Heterodox Law & Economics Approach

The aim of The Legal Foundations of Micro-Institutional Performance is to introduce the reader to a different way of thinking about economics that will allow them to both understand and apply legal concepts to economic analysis. To this end, it adopts and further develops Wesley Hohfeld’s legal framework of jural (legal) relations as a tool of analysis. This analytical tool, as built into the Legal-Economic Performance framework, provides specific direction in identifying and describing interdependence among economic agents (including rights, duties, liberties and exposure to various acts).

The framework adopted and developed in this book relies on the concept of interdependence--that all economic agents are tied together in a legal system given the inherent interdependent nature of transactions in a complex modern global economy. The authors start by developing this framework and then apply it to a variety of settings and empirical examples. Using this new method, economists will be able to reshape their analysis to account for how legal systems and specific legal rules impact economic performance and outcomes.

This approach will be of great interest to graduate and advanced undergraduate social science scholars, faculty interested in the intersections of law and economics and the application of legal concepts to impact analysis, and practitioners in the fields of policy, law and economics.

Sarah S. Klammer, an economist and Academic Specialist and Eric A. Scorsone, Director and Associate Professor, Extension Center for Local Government Finance and Policy, Department of Agricultural, Food and Resource Economics, Michigan State University, US