Ronald Coase

Economist Ronald Coase, best known for the 'Coase Theorem' about transaction costs, offered insights about information gathering and management that parallel those of Alfred Chandler.

     life 

Ronald Harry Coase was born in the UK in 1910, son of a telegraphist in the Post Office. He was educated at Kilburn Grammar as a scholarship boy and studied for a Bachelor of Commerce degree at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by pioneering intellectual property economist Arnold Plant. He was awarded a Cassel Travelling Scholarship from the University of London, with the academic year 1931-32 spent in the US studying industry structures.

He held a teaching position at the Dundee School of Economics & Commerce from 1932 to 1934 (where he delivered the lecture that preceded his landmark 1937 Economica paper 'The Nature of the Firm'), at the University of Liverpool as Assistant Lecturer from 1934 to 1935 and at the London School of Economics from 1935. He was Assistant Lecturer at the LSE from 1935 to 1938 and Lecturer from 1938 to 1947.

In 1940 he entered the civil service as a statistician, initially as Head of Statistical Division at the Forestry Commission and later at the Central Statistical Office, ending as the War Cabinet's chief statistician. He was Acting British Director of Statistics & Intelligence, Combined Production & Resources Board and Representative of the Central Statistical Office in Washington from 1945 to 1946.

He returned to the London School of Economics in 1946, with nine months in the US in 1948 on a Rockefeller Fellowship studying the American broadcasting industry. That resulted in his book British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly (1950). He was Reader at the LSE from 1947 to 1951.

Coase gained a doctorate of science (economics) at the University of London, before moving to the United States in 1951. After a teaching position at the University of Buffalo he spent a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1958, (with a study of the Federal Communications Commission) before moving to the University of Virginia in 1959. His 1961 'The Problem of Social Cost', building on his paper about the FCC - and unlike 'The Nature of the Firm', was "an instant success". leading to recruitment by the University of Chicago (in the law school) in 1964.

In 1977 he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and visiting Distinguished Professor of Law & Economics at the University of Kansas in 1991
 
He was editor of the Journal of Law & Economics from 1964 to 1982.

Coase was awarded the 1991 Nobel prize in Economics for his discovery of "the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy".

Ironically, given frequent citation of his 1960 'The Problem of Social Cost' (claimed as the most-cited paper in economics) until after the Nobel he had honorary degrees from only Yale (1989) and the University of Cologne (1988). He subsequently was awarded honorary degrees from Washington University (1991), the University of Dundee (1992), the University of Buckingham (1995), Beloit College (1996) and the University of Paris (1996).

Coase was is a Fellow of the British Academy, the European Academy, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was a member of the Honour Committee of Euroscience.

     bibliography  

Coase's works include

'The Pig Cycle: A Rejoinder' in Economica 2 (1935) with R.F. Fowler

'Bacon Production and the Pig Cycle in Great Britain' in Economica 2 (1935) with R.F Fowler

'The Problem of Duopoly Reconsidered' in Review of Economic Studies 2 (1935)

'Some Notes on Monopoly Price' in Review of Economic Studies 5 (1937)

'The Pig Cycle in Great Britain: An Explanation' in Economica 4 (1937) with R.F Fowler

'The Nature of the Firm' in Economica 4 (November 1937)

Published Balance Sheets as an Aid to Economic Investigation-Some Difficulties (London: Accounting Research Association 1938) with R.S Edwards & R.F Fowler

'The Iron and Steel Industry 1926-1935: An Investigation Based on the Accounts of Public Companies' Special Memorandum No. 49 of the London and Cambridge Economic Service (London: 1939) with R.S Edwards & R.F Fowler

'Rowland Hill and the Penny Post' in Economica 6 (1939)

'Wire Broadcasting in Great Britain' in Economica 15 (1948)

'The Origin of the Monopoly of Broadcasting in Great Britain' in Economica 14 (1948)

British Broadcasting: A Study in Monopoly (London: Longmans 1950)

'The Federal Communications Commission' in Journal of Law & Economics 2 (October 1959)

'The Problem of Social Cost' in Journal of Law & Economics 3 (October 1960)

'The British Post Office and the Messenger Companies' in Journal of Law & Economics 4 (1961)

The Firm, the Market, and the Law (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1968) - seven essays, including 'The Nature of the Firm'

'The Lighthouse in Economics' in Journal of Law & Economics 17 (October 1974)

'Advertising and Free Speech' in Journal of Legal Studies 6 (1977)

How Should Economists Choose? (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research 1982)

'Professor Sir Arnold Plant: His Ideas and Influence' in The Unfinished Agenda, Essays on the Political Economy of Government Policy in Honour of Arthur Seldon (London: Institute of Economic Affairs 1986) edited by Martin Anderson

'Contracts and The Activities of Firms' in Journal of Law & Economics 34 (1991)

Essays on Economics and Economists (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1995) - 15 essays, including the Nobel oration

'The Acquisition of Fisher Body by General Motors' in Journal of Law & Economics 43 (2000)

     biography and letters

Coase's 1991 Nobel autobiography is here. There's been no major biographical study or published collection of his correspondence.

     studies    

The Legacy of Ronald Coase in Economic Analysis (London: Elgar 1995) edited by by Steven Medema is of value for essays by figures such as Mancur Olsen and Richard Posner and for the comprehensive bibliography of Coase's writings.

There is a concise statement of orthodoxy, enlivened by quotes from Coase, in the 2003 report by the Dallas US Federal Reserve Bank (PDF).

Questions about the role of government are explored in David Moss' When All Else Fails: Government As The Ultimate Risk Manager (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2002)

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