Mancur Olson

The IRIS Center was created in 1990 within the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was led and inspired by Mancur Olson, an eminent development economist, and facilitated by a founding grant from USAID. Learn more about Mancur.

Intensive Research & Thinking

IRIS was established to provide a vehicle for intensive research and thinking about the dynamics of economic development, and to apply these research insights in the context of real-world development challenges.

New Institutional Economics

In 1990, the development community was just beginning to recognize that political and legal institutions — such as property rights and contract enforcement — are not middle-class luxuries but engines of economic growth. Through its pilot field projects as well as through research dissemination, IRIS’s early work influenced the conventional wisdom about development assistance.

The center’s original name — Institutional Reform and the Informal Sector — speaks to our focus on “getting the institutions right.” The center now uses IRIS, the acronym of the original name, since its scope has expanded.

By the time of Olson’s untimely death in 1998, IRIS was sponsoring seminal research on the role of institutions in economic development, had launched or completed development projects in 17 countries, and the New Institutional Economics approach was becoming more widely understood.

Charles Cadwell: Strengthening the Link Between Theory & Practice

Under former Director Charles Cadwell (one of the center's co-founders) and current Executive Director Dennis Wood, IRIS has extended its activities. Much of the Center’s current work can be thought of as “second-generation” innovations in institutional research, building upon Olson’s intellectual insights and grounded in careful analytic and empirical investigation. Examples include:

• Developing detailed implementation “toolkits” for donor field staff that link theory to practice

• Testing alternative approaches to difficult problems of monitoring and evaluation

• Designing empirical methods to address the challenges of measurement and assessment (such as levels of corruption or poverty, or the size of the shadow economy)

• Refining survey design and experimental games to reflect a more nuanced understanding of institutional dynamics

• Pre-testing and analyzing the behavioral response of stakeholders in the reform process, with attention to the cultural and social context

Similarly, IRIS’s technical assistance has focused increasingly on providing sustainable and replicable institutional support:

• Instituting municipal competitions relating to governance issues

• Developing small entrepreneur networks to create credit and marketing opportunities

• Collaborating with experts drawn from civil society and local government on policy research, and, in the process, building local research and analytic capacity

Global Experience

Now in its fifteenth year, IRIS has completed 190 advisory projects in more than 70 countries, and organized or participated in more than 300 conferences and workshops on topics such as anti-corruption reform, poverty assessment, judicial reform, aid effectiveness, small and micro enterprise development, and capital markets development. IRIS employs approximately 40 economists, lawyers, social scientists, and other development specialists at its College Park campus. Another 70 to 100 employees work on overseas projects around the world. IRIS maintains offices in Armenia, Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and Peru.

Mancur Olson, an eminent development economist, founded IRIS in 1990.

With such seminal and enduring works as The Logic of Collective Action and The Rise and Decline of Nations, Olson ensured that governance became an integral part of the dialogue regarding why, and how, countries prosper.