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* Douglass C. NORTH (1920 – ).

Nobel Prize 1993. American economist, professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Gets the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993, shared with Robert W. Fogel for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods to explain economic and institutional change.

In the fifties north begins his historical analysis within the neoclassical theoretical framework. Critical stages of growth conceptions that lead to overestimate the role of industrialization in economic development. Notes the importance it had in the United States agriculture and production for export.

In the sixties is to generalize their studies so that they understand the economic growth in Europe and all the “Western World” but soon discovered the limitations of neoclassical analysis and methodology. It makes a fundamental critique of the simplifying assumptions of reality for use in economic science and intends to adopt more realistic assumptions as those that handle the economic evolutionary Sidney Winter and Jack Hirshleifer.

Throughout the process of thought is gaining increasing importance of the concept of institution that ultimately becomes the key to explaining the evolution and economic development. Douglass North has thus become one of the pioneers of new institutionalism to the theoretical framework provided by its more comprehensive and coherent.

* Richard A. Posner (1939 – ).

Judge Posner, an economist and since 1981 judge of the Supreme Court of the United States, who presided from 1993 to 2000. Graduated in 1959 at Yale, graduated in law at Harvard Law School in 1962. In 1968 he became professor at Stanford University from where he went to the Law School of the University of Chicago (1969-1981) in which academics and educational activities continue to participate regularly.

Richard Posner has researched the application of economic theory to various fields of law such as antitrust legislation, regulation of commercial contracts and litigation. Proposed and defended the idea that the law can be best explained on the assumption that judges seek to promote economic efficiency and wealth maximization as the goal of legal and social policy. It became one of the most prominent leaders of the current Economic Analysis of Law (Law and Economics), applying economic analysis to family law, racial discrimination, case law and privacy.

Founder of the Journal of Legal Studies. He chaired the American Law and Economics Association (1995-96) and is coeditor of the American Law and Economics Review. It is an honorary doctor of the Universities of Syracuse (1986), Duquesne (1987), Georgetown (1993), Ghent (1995), Yale (1996), Pennsylvania (1997), Brooklyn (2000) and Northwestern (2001) … for now.

* Oliver E. WILLIAMSON (1932 – ).

It is a leading theoretician of the new institutionalism. Ph.D. from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1963 is currently professor of “Economics and Law at the University of California at Berkeley.

He is the author of the concept of “governance mechanisms” to refer to the risk control systems associated with any transaction. His main fields of research are the economics of institutions, the strategy of organizations, bureaucracy, politics and transaction costs.

* Gary S. Becker (1930 – ).

Nobel Prize 1992. American economist, studied at Princeton and Chicago. Professor of Economics at Columbia (1960-70) and the University of Chicago.

Becker is an “imperialist” economic science, i.e., use the theoretical tools of economics to explore and “conquer” new territories. In his doctoral thesis analyzed the reasons for racial and sexual discrimination in hiring. In “Crime and Punishment” analyzed the rationality of the offender by the calculation of probabilities of benefits and costs of crime.

Gets the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992 “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a broad range of human behavior and interaction, including no market behavior.”

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