Douglass Cecil North (born November 5, 1920) is co-recipient of the 1993 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He joined the faculty of Washington University in Saint Louis in 1983 as the Henry R. Luce Professor of Law and Liberty in the Department of Economics, and served as director of the Center for Political Economy from 1984 to 1990. In 1992, he became the first economic historian every to win one of the economics profession's most prestigious honors, the John R. Commons Award, which was established by the International Honors Society in Economics in 1965. His current research includes property rights, transaction costs, and economic organization in history as well as economic development in developing countries.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a triple major in political science, philosophy, and economics and joined the Merchant Marine during World War II.

North served as an expert for the Copenhagen Consensus.

Publications

• Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. 1990, Cambridge University Press.

External links

• 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1993/index.html)
• CNISS (http://cniss.wustl.edu/people.html)
• Hoover Institution homepage (http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/north.html)