Elinor Ostrom, a recipient of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2009, had a foundational contribution to the Public Choice movement and to the rise of the new institutionalism and was a key figure in the resurgence of political economy. Her studies of common pool resources, economic governance and institutional diversity are an attempt to transcend the ‘markets vs. states’ dichotomy and are marked by a distinctive approach, relying on multiple methods, interdisciplinary collaborative teamwork and the primacy of empirical observations in field and laboratory settings.