The development of a political-economic framework to explore long-run institutional change occupied me during all of the 1980s and led to the publication of Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance in 1990.

Also publiDouglass Northd as Nobel Prize Lecture. This final stage of development specialization requires increasing percentages of the resources of the society to be active in the market so that the transaction sector becomes a large share of gross national product. Highly specialized forms of transaction organizations emerge at this stage.

He is the co-recipient (with Robert William Fogel) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. ". In the words of the Nobel Committee North and Fogel were awarded the prize "for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change.