The Grand Experiment That Wasn’t?

Within the academy, the collapse of communism was greeted with optimism that the “natural experiment” underway in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union would put to rest long-running debates about the origins and consequences of various institutions stressed by Douglass North and other new institutionalists. With the advantage of hindsight, this optimism appears to have been somewhat misplaced. Identification of causal effects has proven difficult, and few debates have been definitively resolved. Scholars who hoped to identify the effect of constitutions have progressively pushed back the causal apparatus, such that today the emphasis is as much on the precommunist experience as on the postcommunist transition. At the same time, the advent of new data and a change in focus to within country institutions have begun to pay dividends for the study of another key institution: property rights at the level of the firm. In the pages that follow, we trace this evolution of the literature, showing how the study of transition has responded and contributed to our understanding of key political and economic institutions.