Ronald Coase

Ronald Harry Coase ( born December 29, 1910 in Willesden in London, England, † September 2, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois ) was a British economist. He received the 1991 donated by the Bank of Sweden in memory of Alfred Nobel Prize in Economics "for his discovery and clarification of the significance of the so-called transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy," the so-called Coase theorem.

Life

Ronald Coase grew up in England and studied from 1929 to 1931 at the London School of Economics and Political Science ( LSE). His academic career began in Dundee and Liverpool, but he soon returned to the LSE. In 1951 he was appointed professor of the University of Buffalo in the United States, 1958, he moved to the University of Virginia and in 1964 he came to the University of Chicago, whose Professor of Law and Economics, he remained until his retirement in 1982. He was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society.

Coase died on September 2, 2013 at the age of 102 years.

Work

The name Ronald Coase is in the economic debate, especially for two groundbreaking essays on which to base major theories, argues that the economic science today:

1937 wrote Coase, "The Nature of the Firm ," an article in which he described, inter alia, a company as a hierarchical contract braid. He also described the existence of businesses as a result of which occur in the use of market transaction costs. Although Coase later explained that had not been aware of him the consequences of his reasoning, this article is considered the trigger for the contract -oriented view of economic activity, which in the theories of new institutional economics were reflected later. These include the "theory of incomplete contracts ", the transaction cost theory and the principal-agent theory.

Coase was dedicated in 1960 again a contractarian theme and described in " The problem of social cost" the difficulties that cause externalities of economic activity if the affected property rights are not clearly assigned. This essay, a landmark in the theory of property rights ( property rights theory ), influenced the subsequent debates and continues to the present, eg in the field of environmental protection, go back its emissions trading on named after him Coase theorem.

In the area of ​​microeconomics, he devoted himself, inter alia, the pricing behavior of a monopoly, which produces durable goods. Coase conjectured that such a monopolist in the limit behaves as if perfect competition because the provider competes with itself over several periods ( Coase Conjecture ).

He published during his time as a professor in Chicago, the renowned Journal of Law and Economics. His works, especially " The Nature of the Firm ", are regarded as the cornerstone of the New Institutional Economics.

Writings

• The Nature of the Firm in: Economica. New Series. Volume 4, No. 16, 1937, pp. 386-405. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0335.1937.tb00002.x.
• The Problem of Social Cost. In: Journal of Law and Economics. Volume 3, 1960, pp. 1-44, Full Text (PDF, 1.5 MB).