Institutions and Development (Econ 300)

This was a one-off course designed to serve as an on-campus COLL 300 course. COLL 300 is a component of the college curriculum at William and Mary intended to deepen the way students see themselves in the world. Each semester, a common theme is chosen for the on-campus COLL 300 courses and visitors related to the theme are brought to campus. Students attend and reflect on visitor events and engage critically with the theme throughout the semester and with a final project presented at an end-of-semester academic festival. The theme for this semester was ceremony. To engage with the theme through an economic history course, I created a course focused on the relationship between institutions and economic development. The structure and assignments for the course are quite different than those in my other classes both because of the demands of COLL 300 and because of the size of the class, 150 students rather than my typical 15 to 35 students.

Syllabus and Reading List

Syllabus
Reading List

Academic Festival Project

Project Guidelines
Game of Life Cards

Lecture Slides

Below are links to lecture slides for the class. Note that many of the slides may make zero sense without the context of what we were discussing in class. Hopefully they made some sense to students at the time. Also note that each link below is to a pdf file that covers several lectures' worth of slides. Some of the files are quite large.

Introduction to Institutions
Institutional Change and the Rise of Modern Economies
Institutions and Long Run Development
Persistent Impacts of Past Institutions
Religion and the Economy