Ronald Harry Coase II
May 7, 2010
The ideas of this project became the basis of his article, published in 1937, "The Nature of the Firm". In this article Coase introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms, explaining the basic economics of the business enterprise. It became one of the most influential works in the history of the dismal science, outlining the subtle logic of how firms pursue efficiency in a complicated world. Ronald Harry Coase graduated from the London School of Economics with a B.Com. (Econ) in 1932, and earned a doctorate from the &#&University of London&#& in 1951. He migrated to the United States that same year and started work at the University of Buffalo. In 1959 after a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, he joined the economics department of the University of Virginia. He wrote an article about The Federal Communications Commission published in 1959. Part of the argument expose in this article was considered to be erroneous by a number of economists at the University of Chicago and he was asked to write up his argument for publication in the Journal of Law and Economics. Although the main points were already to be found in The Federal Communications Commission, he wrote another article, The Problem of Social Cost, which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). Unlike his earlier article on "The Nature of the Firm", this one was an instant success. It was, and continues to be, much discussed. Indeed it is probably the most widely cited article in the whole of the modern economic literature. Coase settled at the University of Chicago in 1964 and became the editor of the Journal of Law and Economics. Coase wonders in his autobiography what would happen if the economists at the University of Chicago didn't think he was mistaken in the article on The Federal Communications Commission. The obvious answer is that probably The Problem of Social Cost would never have been written. This article and The Nature of the Firm were both cited by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences as justification for awarding Ronald Harry Coase the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1991, "for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy" There are so many other things to say about this incredible man, who have had so difficult educational beginnings, but one of the best is this one: reaching his 100th birthday, Coase is still working. He is writing a book regarding the rise of economic China and Vietnam. Amazing!!. <input id="gwProxy" type="hidden"><!--Session data--><input></p> |