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Doug Allen awarded Douglass C. North Research Award
Burnaby Mountain Professor of Economics Douglas Allen was recently awarded the Douglass C. North Research Award by the International Society of New Institutional Economics (ISNIE).
“I’m very happy and honored to win this award. The book project was a lot of fun, and this is just icing on the cake.” said Allen.
The Douglass C. North award was established in 2014 and Allen was one of the first award winners. This new award is for the best paper or book published during the previous two years on the topic of Institutional Economics.
Allen’s book, “The Institutional Revolution”, is an engaging explanation of why pre-modern institutions – like venality and patronage – were so common and why they died out in the 19th century and were replaced by the modern institutions we see today. In Allen’s words his book “explains why the world of Samuel Pepys, John Churchill, and Jane Austen was so different from our own and why it all changed during the 19th century.”
From dueling to purchasing military commissions, Allen provides fascinating examples of how the rules that governed pre-modern society hinged on the ability to measure performance in a world where nature played a deep and ubiquitous role. Changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution allowed for the measurement of such basic things like time and distance, and allowed for widespread measurement of worker performance. Modern institutions like “free labor” soon followed.
Allen has published extensively in the fields of institutional economics, law and economics, and microeconomics theory. Some of his other work explores gold rushes, the ancient Olympics, the English longbow, farming, and marriage.
The award was presented during the 18th Annual Conference of the International Society for new Institutional Economics from June 19-21, 2014.
The International Society for new Institutional Economics is an interdisplinary association that was established in 1996. Scholars from over 46 countries contribute to exploring institutions in the past, present, and future.