Institutions as Capital: towards a growth theory suitable for economic history

The Economic and Social History department and Institutions for Open Societies are delighted to welcome professor McCants. She will present and discuss her paper Institutions as Capital: towards a growth theory suitable for economic history, which she has written with co-author Dan Seligson. With your registration you will receive the pre-circulated paper about a week prior to the seminar.

Anne McCants is Professor of History and Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT, where she directs the Concourse Program for the integration of humanistic study with the science core. She currently serves as the President of the International Economic History Association and as a co-editor for both Social Science History and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Her current work includes a study of medieval building technology in its social and economic context, an examination of the role of gender norms and marriage systems in long-run economic growth, and problems in measuring and modeling institutional and economic development. Her long-standing inventory-based research in the origins and the socio-economic scope of the consumer revolution in the Dutch Republic continues, now extended to a comparative project using Cape Colony sources for South Africa.

The seminar is organised by Christophe Schellekens and Vigyan Ratnoo, section of Economic and Social History (ESH) of Utrecht University.