School thesis
Institutionalist macro makes rules, organizations, norms, and state capacity part of the model. Markets are organized through institutions.
Institutionalist economics starts from markets embedded in institutions. Rules, norms, firms, labor systems, states, and legal structures are part of the economy's operating system.
Macro outcomes depend on prices and preferences, but also on the institutional channels that govern bargaining, investment, employment, and adaptation.
Use when
Legal rules, corporate organization, labor systems, state capacity, norms, and historical path dependence. Markets are treated as institutionally made and institutionally maintained.
Evidence burden
Cross-country differences in labor institutions, wage bargaining, housing finance, and fiscal capacity produce different macro outcomes under similar shocks.
Rival check
Similar macro outcomes across institutionally different economies after the relevant shock.
Mechanism chain
Claim
Rules, bargaining systems, organizations, and historical arrangements shape macro outcomes as much as prices do.
Mechanism
Institutional design shapes coordination, bargaining power, investment behavior, and the persistence of macro outcomes.
Policy read
Change the institutional structure that produces the problem instead of assuming small price adjustments will solve it on their own.
Mechanism
The claim needs each step in the data; a missing link weakens the whole interpretation.
Rules
Property rights, labor law, firm organization, finance, procurement, and courts define what agents can do.
Behavior
Firms, unions, banks, households, and states respond through organizations, contracts, and norms.
Path
Institutions carry past bargains into current inflation, employment, investment, and crisis dynamics.
Reads the economy through
institutions / rules / organizations / historical context
Lineage
Historical moves show which problem the tradition was built to solve and which claim it keeps defending.
Veblen and Commons
Early institutionalists studied habits, legal rules, firms, and collective action as economic forces.
Comparative political economy
Labor systems, welfare states, finance, and corporate governance change how similar shocks transmit.
Modern growth evidence
Institutional quality affects long-run growth and the severity of macro volatility.