Institutions, the economy, economics, and other disciplines

Ph.D. in Economics, Cambridge University, United Kingdom, 1999.

Email: ddequech@gmail.com

Professor, Institute of Economics, University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

Visiting Scholar, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, 2011-2012.

Visiting Scholar, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, Germany, 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 (three months each stay).

Visiting Scholar, University of Paris Nanterre, Paris, France, 2003-2004.

I am an economist, but my work, especially when dealing with institutions and related topics, is interdisciplinary. By institutions I mean socially shared (systems of) rules  of behavior or thought. My work combines contributions from different approaches within economics and from different disciplines. Most of my research and graduate teaching has been on two interrelated sets of issues.

(1) The relations between institutions, on the one hand, and the behavior and the thought of economic agents, on the other

I have discussed how institutions influence people's behavior and thought, how different social factors may lead economic agents to follow existing institutional rules, and how individual and collective agents reproduce institutions, but are also capable of deviating from them and transforming them, leading to endogenous institutional change.

(2) The importance and ubiquity of institutions in economic life

In this case, the general idea is to show that institutions, including informal ones (like conventions and informal social norms), are much more present and much more important in economic life than most economists usually recognize.

I have also worked on other set of issues that partly overlap the previous ones: (3) the theory of economic behavior under uncertainty, (4) the distinction between neoclassical, mainstream, orthodox, and heterodox economics, and (5) the history of economic thought, especially regarding Keynes.

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