When does the AFEE 2027 Conference take place?

The conference is scheduled to run for several days, commencing in early January.

Where will the AFEE 2027 Conference be held?

The conference will be held in Washington, USA.

What is the primary focus of the AFEE 2027 Conference?

The conference's primary focus is 'Institutional Economics at its Frontiers,' exploring advanced topics and new directions in the field.

AFEE 2027 Conference – Institutional Economics at its Frontiers

Name: AFEE 2027 Conference – Institutional Economics at its Frontiers
Start: 2027-01-03T00:00:00Z
End: 2027-01-05T00:00:00Z
Location: Washington

Jan 3–5, 2027Washington, United StatesIn-person

Registration open

The AFEE 2027 Conference, themed 'Institutional Economics at its Frontiers,' will convene in Washington, United States. This event serves as a critical forum for scholars and practitioners to delve into the evolving landscape of institutional economics, exploring its theoretical advancements and practical applications in contemporary global challenges. Participants will engage in discussions that push the boundaries of current understanding, fostering new research directions and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Committees & topics

Topics
New Developments in Original Institutional Economics · Reassessing Core Institutionalist Concepts: Power, Value, Social Control, and Working Rules · Institutional Change, Stability, and Path Dependence · Evolutionary and Historical Approaches to Economic Analysis · Revisiting and Extending Veblen, Commons, Ayres, Galbraith, Polanyi, and Related Traditions · Institutional Economics in Dialogue with Feminist, Marxian, Post-Keynesian, Ecological, and Decolonial Approaches · Methodological Pluralism in Institutional Economics · Qualitative, Historical, Archival, and Ethnographic Methods

Why it matters

Institutional economics offers a vital lens through which to understand the complex interplay between societal structures, human behavior, and economic outcomes. In an era marked by rapid technological change, shifting geopolitical dynamics, and persistent global challenges, the insights derived from this field are more pertinent than ever. The conference provides a platform for examining how institutions, both formal and informal, shape economic development, influence policy decisions, and contribute to or hinder societal well-being.

This gathering is particularly significant for its focus on the 'frontiers' of institutional economics. This implies an exploration of novel methodologies, emerging areas of application, and critical re-evaluations of established theories. Such an approach is essential for ensuring that the field remains relevant and responsive to the complexities of the modern world, offering robust frameworks for analysis and problem-solving. The discussions will likely touch upon issues ranging from market design and regulatory frameworks to the economics of innovation and the role of governance in fostering sustainable growth.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes of the AFEE 2027 Conference, a deep understanding of institutional economics is paramount. This includes familiarity with core concepts such as transaction costs, property rights, and the role of norms and conventions in economic activity. Participants should be prepared to discuss how these foundational ideas are being reinterpreted or expanded upon in light of new empirical evidence and theoretical developments.

Consider how different institutional arrangements impact economic performance and societal welfare. For instance, exploring the nuances of how formal legal systems versus informal social contracts influence economic actors can provide valuable insights. Additionally, understanding the dynamics of institutional change and persistence, as well as the mechanisms through which institutions evolve or are reformed, will be crucial for contributing meaningfully to the conference's discussions. Engaging with lessons such as "Dynamic Analysis" and "Understanding Motivations" can provide a framework for analyzing these complex interactions. Furthermore, considering how various stakeholders, as explored in "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" and "Hidden Stakeholders," are affected by and influence institutional frameworks will enrich any analysis.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 1 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

United States

A key center for institutional economic thought and policy application.

Role in topic

The USA, as the host nation, is a significant hub for institutional economics research and policy implementation. Its diverse economic landscape and robust academic institutions provide a rich environment for studying the impact of various institutional structures on market dynamics, regulatory frameworks, and innovation. Discussions at the conference will likely draw heavily on examples and case studies from the USA, reflecting its influence on global economic discourse.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

New Developments in Original Institutional Economics

Original Institutional Economics (OIE) emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries through the work of Thorstein Veblen, John R. Commons, Wesley Mitchell, and Clarence Ayres, distinguishing itself from neoclassical economics by emphasizing habits, institutions, technology, and evolutionary processes rather than equilibrium and rational choice. After being marginalized during the mid-20th century rise of formalist economics, OIE was revitalized through the founding of the Association for Evolutionary Economics (AFEE) in 1965 and its Journal of Economic Issues, sustaining a distinct heterodox tradition centered in the United States but with growing European and global participation. In recent decades, OIE scholars have pushed the tradition into new terrain: the analysis of financialization, platform capitalism, climate breakdown, care economies, and the institutional dimensions of inequality. Debates continue over how sharply to distinguish OIE from New Institutional Economics (Williamson, North), how to incorporate insights from complexity and evolutionary biology, and how to operationalize concepts like instrumental valuation for contemporary policy. The frontier today involves both deepening theoretical foundations and demonstrating empirical and policy relevance — from industrial policy revivals to just transition frameworks — while engaging with adjacent heterodox traditions and reckoning with the discipline's Eurocentric origins.

Key players

Institutional Change, Stability, and Path Dependence

Understanding how institutions persist, evolve, or transform has been central to institutional economics since Veblen's account of cumulative causation and Commons's analysis of legal-economic evolution. The late 20th century brought formal treatments of path dependence (David, Arthur) and lock-in, alongside Douglass North's work on institutional change and historical political economy accounts of critical junctures and gradual transformation (Mahoney, Thelen). Debates persist over the relative weight of agency versus structure, the role of crises and exogenous shocks, and how to model layered, drifting, or converted institutions. The 2008 financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate emergency, and the geopolitical fragmentation of the 2020s have all served as natural experiments in institutional resilience and reconfiguration, exposing both the stickiness of incumbent arrangements and the possibility of rapid policy shifts. The current frontier asks how path dependence interacts with intentional institutional design — for example, in industrial policy revivals, central bank mandates, and decarbonization pathways — and how evolutionary frameworks can illuminate both stability traps and windows for transformation.

Key players

Evolutionary and Historical Approaches to Economic Analysis

Evolutionary economics traces its lineage to Veblen's call for a 'post-Darwinian' economics and was revived in modern form by Nelson and Winter's 1982 Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, which modeled firms as bundles of routines undergoing selection. Parallel historical approaches — from the German Historical School to the Annales tradition, economic history, and historical political economy — have insisted on the time-bound, context-specific nature of economic phenomena. These traditions share a rejection of timeless equilibrium analysis in favor of process, novelty, and cumulative causation. They have shaped scholarship on technological change, innovation systems, long waves, growth regimes, and the rise and decline of economic orders. Recent work integrates complexity economics, agent-based modeling, and big-data historical reconstruction with longstanding qualitative methods. Key debates concern the appropriate analogues to biological evolution, the place of intentionality and learning, the relationship between micro-routines and macro-patterns, and how historical scholarship should inform contemporary policy on innovation, industrial strategy, and structural transformation.

Key players

Institutional Economics in Dialogue with Feminist, Marxian, Post-Keynesian, Ecological, and Decolonial Approaches

Heterodox economics comprises overlapping but distinct traditions that have long maintained productive tensions with institutionalism. Feminist economics foregrounds care, social reproduction, and gendered power; Marxian political economy centers class, exploitation, and capital accumulation; post-Keynesian economics emphasizes fundamental uncertainty, effective demand, and monetary production; ecological economics insists on biophysical limits and entropy; and decolonial approaches challenge the Eurocentric construction of economic knowledge and the colonial roots of global inequality. Institutionalism's emphases on power, history, evolution, and social embeddedness offer natural points of dialogue, and significant cross-fertilization has occurred — visible in care-economy scholarship, social structures of accumulation theory, monetary-institutional analyses of financialization, ecological-institutionalist work on commons and provisioning, and growing engagement with scholars from the Global South. Tensions remain over methodology, the priority of class versus other axes of power, and the universality of categories developed in the North Atlantic. The frontier involves building genuine synthesis rather than mere coexistence, while preserving the analytical distinctness of each tradition and addressing pressing issues such as just transitions, global inequality, and the remaking of work.

Key players

Methodological Pluralism in Institutional Economics

Institutional economics has long resisted the methodological monism of mainstream economics, drawing on history, law, sociology, anthropology, and political science alongside formal modeling. Methodological pluralism — the principled use of multiple, complementary methods and theoretical lenses — has been defended by figures such as Sheila Dow, Tony Lawson, Geoffrey Hodgson, and Wilfred Dolfsma, often in conversation with critical realism and the philosophy of social science. The case for pluralism rests on the open, structured, and historically situated character of economic systems, which no single method can fully capture. Pluralism is distinguished from 'anything goes' eclecticism by criteria of internal consistency, ontological fit, and dialogue across approaches. It has institutional implications for journals, curricula, and the organization of the discipline, where pressures toward standardization remain strong. Current debates concern how to combine quantitative, computational, qualitative, and historical methods in practice; how to assess and compare findings across paradigms; and how to defend pluralism within hiring, publishing, and funding systems that often reward methodological uniformity.

Key players

Qualitative, Historical, Archival, and Ethnographic Methods

Long before the contemporary 'qualitative turn' in parts of economics, institutionalists relied on case studies, legal-historical analysis, business history, and direct observation. Commons's investigations of labor and industrial relations, the Wisconsin school's legal-economic research, and Mitchell's empirical work on business cycles drew on extensive archival and documentary evidence, while later scholars such as Polanyi and Galbraith combined historical narrative with conceptual innovation. These methods have been complemented by ethnographic approaches drawn from economic anthropology and economic sociology — including studies of markets as social constructions, the lived experience of work and finance, and the everyday politics of valuation. Archival work has been central to historical political economy, business history, and the reconstruction of regulatory and monetary regimes. Such methods generate evidence that statistical and formal approaches typically cannot. The contemporary frontier includes the integration of qualitative and computational methods, the use of digital archives and text-as-data, ethnographies of finance and platforms, oral histories of economic change, and reflexive attention to positionality — particularly as research engages communities and institutions across the Global South and historically marginalized populations.

Key players