Invitation to Join the International Society for New Institutional Economics

From Ronald Coase and Douglass North

September 1997

Dear Colleague,

We are writing to invite you to join the International Society for New Institutional Economics, which has just been formed to bring together people working in this area, particularly those doing empirical work.

Scholars working in applied NIE include political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and lawyers, as well as economists in such diverse fields as economic history, law and economics, public policy, industrial organization, business, and microeconomics. You may be unaware of many of the individuals working in this field. Excellent studies published in a variety of journals may escape your notice if they are not in the journals you typically read. You may not know of the applied work in NIE taking place in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States and Canada.

The Society aims to fill these gaps by bringing together scholars in countries all over the world who are working on transaction costs, contracting, political rules of the game, the rule of law, norms and culture, and so on, and who pursue these interests using standard scientific methods. While theorists are very welcome, the main emphasis is empirical. These ideas were discussed recently at a Washington University conference on contracting which included participants from the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Paris, and the World Bank. A group of scholars subsequently decided to create the International Society for New Institutional Economics. That is why we are writing to you today. We hope you will join us. As soon as there is a critical mass of members, we plan to issue a newsletter including a membership list, abstracts of current research, and a calendar of upcoming events. Subsequently we plan to hold an international conference. Initially, there are two regional clearing houses: the University of Missouri site, maintained by Mike Sykuta, and the University of Paris site, maintained by Claude Menard. More sites will be added later. A web page for the Society has been established at http://isnie.org If you wish to join the Society, you can call up this web page and fill out the membership form included there.

Please include abstracts of your current research which you would like to see displayed on the web page, and information on conferences or other events of interest. We would also like to know your views concerning the Society and what it should do, and the names and addresses of others who might be interested in joining. Feel free to forward this letter to interested colleagues. If you do not wish to join now, please write to either address above and tell us why.

We look forward to hearing from you.